ery.djunaedy

Taxies: Indonesians are (actually) not lazy

It was our trip back to Lafayette, Indiana, from ifthar gathering in Springfield, Illinois, sometime back in Ramadhan 2004. The trip was around three hours, and it was late in the night. But for the three of us in the car, the trip was fun because we were engaged in a deep discussion.

One of the things that I asked Paul Horstman, who was driving the other day, was about taxi: how many kinds of taxi do you know? I think he was unprepared for that question. “What do you mean how many?” he asked. A taxi is a taxi.

Well, yeah, I said, you probably know only one kind of taxi, which is a car. For us in Indonesia, we know a lot of other kinds of taxi. Of course, we have the standard taxi as it is known here in the US.

But apart from that, we also have motorcyle taxi, which is called ojek.

picture from expat.or.id

As you can see in the picture above, ojek is mainly run by individuals. They wait for the passengers usually at the entrance of big housing complexes where there is no public transport serving the complex. Safety is not a very big concern when you ride an ojek, some of them might offer you a helmet, but most of them will just “tancap gas” (which means go off) right after he feels (he wont even look at you) that you have been seated behind him without even asking you where to go. Only after riding for a while that he asks where to go.

Apart from that, we also have ojek sepeda (see picture below) which means bicycle taxi. Its similar to the ojek, but the driver gets a little bit more sweat as he has to paddle the bicycle under the tropical sun.

A fancy counterpart of ojek sepeda can be found in the City of Buffalo (below). I might be mistaken, but the bike taxi in Buffalo seems to be more of a tourist attraction than a transportation solution.

Source: Buffalo Bike Taxi

There is nothing fancy about ojek sepeda. It is there because of pure demand. The demand of getting some money (albeit very minimal) for the driver, and the demand of transportation for the client who needed the bike taxi service because the areas are not covered by the public transport.

No, not yet. The list is not over yet. We still have “ojek payung“, which means umbrella taxi (below).

Source: Agus Syafii’s Blog

The kids with happy faces and colorful umbrella in the picture above are commonly found in front of malls and supermarkets in Indonesia. What they do is renting out the umbrella to people either to reach their car or the a bus stop with a shelter. Many of them usually bring two umbrellas, one for themselves and the other one for the customer. But most of them will simply walk in the rain.

Will many people hire the ojek payung, you said? That means you haven’t been in Indonesia, right? Indonesia has the kind of tropical rain that will make you soak just with a minute of shower. People will be happy to rent from them.

I think it was the first time that Paul heard about this, and he kept saying “what?!” repeatedly every time I told him about the kind of taxi he has never heard before. And those are the taxies that I quickly summarized for him just to give in the big picture.

***

As if those weird kinds of taxies are not enough, a new development in the world of taxies put me in no other position than to report (Paul, this one is for you) that there is a new kind of taxi in Indonesia: food taxi (ojek makanan). I actually do not know if such a thing exists, until the trouble in IPDN.

IPDN is a school that trains future administrators (and supposedly leaders) of local governments. Even though their future duties will be as civilian administrators, the education system in IPDN is very much militaristic in its approach. Furthermore, the senior students have the rights to beat up their juniors. Although the IPDN administrators said that those beatings not part of the system, the practice is widely know and has caused several death in the past, with many of the seniors were charged and convicted for the crime.

So as you can imagine, the campus of such school will have their own kitchen to cater for the needs of the students. The students are basically not allowed to buy food outside the campus kitchen.

But you know Indonesia, food is everywhere and your imagination is the limit of the variety. Those students has been exposed to that kind of environment before they come to IPDN, and now they have to refrain from buying those food, literally on other sides of the fence.

The solution: ojek makanan. There will always be someone who will bridge the gap between supply and demand. These people, the food taxi, are basically delivering the food into the IPDN campus. God knows how the students order the food in the first place. But in this SMS country, everything can be ordered with a text message through a cell phone.

Of course these transactions are deemed illegal by the IPDN, and these poor people could be charged of trespassing. They could be detained by the campus security.

But that does not stop them to continue to operate: they do what they have to do.

And don’t tell me that ojek makanan is the same thing as food delivery man that you find everywhere in the US. No food delivery will ever deliver your food to a campus where outside food is prohibited.

***

The ojeks actually remind me of what Hernando de Soto (in The Mystery of Capital) said about people in the failed-capitalist countries. We cannot be anywhere in those big cities “without someone trying to make a deal with you.”

These people keep on trying to squeeze some money out of impossible situations. Look at the creativity that they have to pursue new kind of business that we would have never thought possible.

Why am I writing this? Well, Paul might love this new addition of taxies that he would never thought exists. Other than that, I just want to show that Indonesians (and many people in other countries) actually work very hard for their own livelihood. The fact that they remain poor shows that somebody has to do something to help them jump off the poverty line. This somebody might be you, or the government, or whatever.

want to add to that list. Another kind of taxi