These roads were made for walking? The nature and use of rural public transport services in Garut Regency, West Java, Indonesia
| Autor: | D.C. Johnston |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2007 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. 28:171-187 |
| ISSN: | 1467-9493 0129-7619 |
| DOI: | 10.1111/j.1467-9493.2007.00289.x |
| Popis: | Public passenger transport services receive relatively little space in the literatures on rural transport in developing economies, which mostly focus on the provision, or socioeconomic impacts, of roads. The implication is either that rural people are able to purchase or have access to motorized transport - or that they can walk on thoroughfares intended for vehicles. Statistics from Indonesia show that a low proportion of rural households own motor vehicles, but that rural bus services have seen a substantial expansion since the late 1970s; however, the coverage of the rural population is not com- plete. Based on survey data from villages ( desa ) in West Java, Indonesia, this paper explores several issues with respect to bus operations and motorcycle taxi ( ojek ) services in rural areas: the nature of public passenger services, the users of those services and the nature of trips made. Rural transport in developing countries This case study of public transport services in one area of rural Indonesia has two specific objectives. The first is to examine the nature and types of rural public transport services available, and the second, to establish who travels, how and why. Together, these objec- tives serve the paper's general aim of counteracting the modes of thinking that have con- tributed to the remarkable lack of substantive attention given to public transport in rural areas, where distances between homes and public facilities are usually much greater than they are in urbanized settings. Three main fallacies have long dogged thinking about the role of transport in 'devel- opment'. The first, the presumed direct causal relationship between transport improve- ment and economic growth, is an outcome of the dominance in the social sciences of 'modernization theory, and the tradition of economic thought known as neoclassical economics from which it is derived' (Simon, 1996: 34). Further, there is an element of confusion in comparing a wide range of situations and scales to which the 'better trans- port brings accelerated development' formulation is uncritically applied - encompassing the development of countries, of subnational regions and of rural conditions at the scale of individual settlements. The second fallacy is the idea that just constructing or upgrad- ing roads is sufficient to stimulate increased agricultural production and improved utili- zation of social services. While the existence of (improved) roads could be expected to bolster expectations of lower transport costs and shorter travel times, more competitive produce prices and cheaper agricultural inputs, or at least access to wider markets, all presuppose the presence of motorized vehicles, presumably as one manifestation of the supposed trickle-down effect as development proceeds. Yet in most developing economy contexts, relatively few rural people can afford motor vehicles and many rural areas have no access to public transport at all (Dawson & Barwell, 1993). The third fallacy is that any transport improvements available to a given rural village will benefit all of its residents equally |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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