Experts ask Indonesian government to reassess Jakarta-Surabaya high-speed rail link

The director of public policy at the Center for Economic and Legal Studies (Celios) believes the government needs to review plans to extend the Javan High Speed Rail project to Surabaya, East Java.He believes that there is a need to reflect on the Jakarta-Bandung HSR project, which has encountered a lot of problems from its planning and construction to its current operation. This needs to be a caveat for the next government as to whether it really wants to build the Jakarta-Surabaya HSR, as the Jakarta-Bandung HSR alone has many such problems.Researchers from the Center for Economic and Legal Studies (Celios) said the Jakarta-Bandung High Speed Rail (HSR) project has deviated from the initial development plan. The initial plan for the Jakarta-Bandung HSR was for the track to be 150.5 kilometers long with eight stations. However, the current realized length of the line is 142.3 kilometers with four stations, one of which, the Garawang Station, will be operated in 2025, and then the operation of this high-speed rail has failed to meet the initial target of operation from 2019 to 2023. There were operating cost overruns during the construction of the HSR as the initial plan was US$5.5 billion but the actual expenditure amounted to US$7.27 billion. He also assessed that due to the HSR train fare being set at Rp175,000 to Rp600,000, this mode of public transportation could only be enjoyed by the middle and upper classes. On top of that, the government aims for the Jakarta-Bandung HSR to realize up to US$62.2 billion in revenue between 2019 and 2050, or the equivalent of Rp 961 trillion.

The current average fare for all service levels is Rp 330,000, and in order to achieve this, from 2025 to 2045, HSR trains must carry at least 398,000 passengers per day. This number exceeds the current average number of people traveling to Jakarta-Bandung, which is about 19,000 per day. On top of that, the Jakarta-Bandung express train only stops at four stations - Halim, Karawang, Padalarang and Tegalluar stations - so of course it can't fully satisfy everyone's destination needs. It is very, very unlikely that this goal will be achieved, and even if it is, it will take longer than 2045 to actually achieve the Rp 961 trillion goal. To address this issue, it is not impossible that if the Jakarta-Surabaya HSR project follows the scenario of the Jakarta-Bandung HSR project, the project will place a greater burden on the state budget. The project also does not address the issue of public transportation more strategically and will only benefit the upper class users rather than the lower class. Despite the many serious problems with the HSR project at the moment, the government does not seem to want to review it and move on to the next project from Jakarta to Surabaya.