It's Way Too Hard to Get Around Jakarta When You're Disabled

Sunarno and his young daughter walked slowly through the crowd. They looked weary and tired. The family struggled to cross the tracks to reach the train. Dini helped his father up the stairs, then led him to a priority seat inside the car.

Sunarno is visually impaired. Every day, the middle-aged man commutes from the city's east to the south to take his daughter to school. For years, he's relied on the commuter rail train to get around. The train system is still difficult to navigate, but it used to be much, much worse, he told me.

“The facility is quite good now," Sunarno said. "They have tactile paving. But the gap between the platform and train car is still too high. I need help from the security guards just to get inside."

Several hours before meeting up with Sunarno, I walked around Lenteng Agung station to see how accessible the facility was for commuters with disabilities. And even I, as an able-bodied person, found it rather difficult to cross the damaged sections of road and narrow pedestrian bridge. Sure, once you're inside the station, you'll be walking on the nice cemented floor. But outside, it's still a mess. And this is just one of the many problems in this city that, while they may seem trivial to someone like me, are an immense challenge for people with disabilities like Sunarno.

I ran into Ichsan, a man who has worked at the train station for the past year. He agreed that not all the train stations are equipped with disabled-friendly features. He's seen people with crutches and wheelchairs struggle to get onto the train, and told me that portable ramps are only available at bigger stations like the ones in Central Jakarta.

“The security guards will help people with disabilities, and sometimes there are other passengers who help them too," he said. "But the facilities are not fully accessible."

A Transjakarta bus shelter.

For a city as packed as Jakarta, it's alarming how little access there is for people with disabilities. And this goes beyond the train stations. The majority of our streets don't have sidewalks, and those that do are often so unkempt that they're full of holes, or used as parking spaces for motorbikes. And for people who can't afford to drive their own cars, relying on whatever public transportation available means having to deal with inadequate facilities.

There are about 6,000 people living with a disability in Jakarta, according to a 2016 data from the According to the data from Central Statistics Agency (BPS). That's only 0.0006 percent of the city's total population, but it's also probably seriously under-estimated.

Those living with disabilities are protected by laws that grant them rights to accessible public services, meaning that Jakarta is supposed to be more disability-friendly than it is now. But according to a 2015 study of 10 train stations by Jakarta's Legal Aid Institute (LBH), all of them were deemed inaccessible for anyone with a disability.

“The research has recommended solutions, but some of them are still being ignored by the government,” Pratiwi Febri, a researcher at LBH Jakarta, told me.

This ignorance is a form of government-led discrimination, Ferbi said. People with disabilities are sadly often considered "abnormal," by others and that's why their rights are often ignored, she concluded.

“Just like the access to the train station, it’s also difficult to access bus shelter,” Febri continued. “Disabled people are never involved in development planning. But the government can’t build a facility without involving them as stakeholders.”

After meeting Sunarno, I walked over to the bus shelter in front of the City Hall, where I saw three construction workers building a restroom for the disabled. It's in one of the two bus shelters built for disabled people in the entire city. For now, it's unclear if the other 218 bus shelters in the city are going to get the same upgrades, but the Jakarta government announced it will roll out 300 disabled-friendly buses starting last year.

Still, the city is already so far behind that it's hard to see how it could ever catch up, said Gunawan Tjahjono, an urban planning expert at University of Indonesia.

"They can start by building sidewalks that can be accessed by pedestrians, disabled or not," he said. "But reality is far from ideal. They would rather build infrastructure that makes it easier for people who have vehicles."

Whenever the sidewalks finally receive the much-needed facelift, the government can then start adding things like accessible restrooms and street signs, Gunawan explained.

Jakarta's accessibility problem has been going on so long that people like Sunarno can't really do anything but find ways to deal with what little they've been given. For Sunarno, complaining won't solve anything. So, instead, he walks out of his house each day determined tackle his challenges, one at a time.

"I don't ask for much," Sunarno told me. "I just want to be able to get on the train car myself."

This article is a collaboration between VICE and Rexona to highlight the rights of people with disabilities in Indonesia.