Making TransJakarta a World Class BRT System - ITDP | Institute for ...

indefinite period of time. In these cities, the bus companies always paid for the buses in
exchange for exclusive rights to operate buses in particular corridors. Within these
corridors, these bus companies also provided feeder bus services. Having a single
company provide a monopoly service in the corridor made possible smooth integration of
the ticketing system between the trunk lines and the feeder lines.
However, these systems had several problems. The main problem is that with a long
term monopoly supplier in a corridor, there was always pressure by the supplier to
increase the bus fares. Currently in Curitiba the bus fare is nearly $0.75 (Rp.7000).
Secondly, if the bus operator was providing poor quality service, the transit authority
URBS had very little recourse short of terminating a 10 year concession contract, and
shutting down service until a new company could be hired.
Bogota overcame these problems by de-linking the bus operating contracts from specific
corridors. In other words, instead of giving a bus operating company a concession to
operate buses in a specific corridor, TransJakarta could negotiate operating contracts with
consortiums or individual private bus companies which would be paid a guaranteed
minimum number of bus/kilometers over a period of 6 – 10 years in exchange for
agreeing to provide a service at an acceptable quality standard at a fixed price per
kilometer. The number of bus kilometers would be a function of the number of buses
they were willing to invest in. The number of years would be driven by the time required
to recoup the investment in the buses.
This contracting model was first developed in Bogota’s TransMilenio system, and was
one of TransMilenio’s most important innovations. Unlike in Curitiba and Quito, where
separate corridors are concessioned out to different operators, in TransMilenio contracts
were awarded to different private operating companies, Si 99, Ciudad Movil, Express Del
Futuro, and Metrobus SA. These contracts obligate the companies to operate a certain
fixed number of buses in the corridors, but the routes on which these buses operate are
not all concentrated on a single corridor. Rather, they are divided roughly equally
between the different bus lines.
Each week, TransMilenio decides how many kilometers need to be operated to meet
expected demand, and the private operators decide among themselves who is going to
operate them each week. They then inform TransMilenio who is going to operate each
route, and TransMilenio gives final approval. At first, TransMilenio directly assigned
the buses to meet the daily scheduled service needs. Then according to the number of
kilometers needed they divided the kilometers up according to each company’s fleet size.
The fleets are not all the same size. The bus operators, among themselves, try to organize
it in a fair way among themselves so that each bus gets roughly the same number of
kilometers.
Even though the bus operators are paid by the passenger kilometer, they ultimately bear
some demand risk, because if the demand is lower than projected, TransMilenio has the
right to reduce the total number of bus kilometers servicing the system. However, this
risk is mitigated by two factors. First, because routes are diversified within the system,
Final Recommendations for TransJakarta, p. 35