Train Spaces Robin Hartanto Honggare
After a while, I learnt that there were three types of commuter train services running around Jakarta: the Economy train, which I used the most during my undergraduate study; the Economy AC train, which cars used air-conditioning— the “AC” stands for it; and the Express AC train, which were quite similar to the Economy AC train, but it skipped many stations to fasten the trip. The company which run the train services later decided to diminish this division, but that was only happened a year after I graduated. The Economy train was, of course, the worst among all. Its price—Rp 1,500 ($0.11) per ride, four times cheaper than the Economy AC train—should tell the difference. In one sentence, the Economy train was the grim reality of the city being condensed into running aluminium capsules. Brokenness, overcrowdedness, dustiness, hotness, unclarity, unpredictability, complicities, criminalities, and many other dysfunctionalities of Jakarta were encapsulated inside the tight spaces of train cars that the only way you could survive them was just to be pasrah—an Indonesian word meaning the state of letting things go. And yet, despite all the chaotic occurrences that could happen inside, the Economy train somehow provided more intimacy than the other train services. Perhaps it’s the absence of comfort that pushed people to talk and shout to each other carelessly. Or, it might be the unauthorized activities that animated the cars. While being a living room for passengers, the train was a concert stage to many different kinds of street musicians, and a moving market for selling really various stuff: fruits, foods, drinks, books, newspapers, plant fertilizers, phone casings, massage sticks, and many other things. These different functional interpretations brought up many possibilities of social encounters and interactions that contrasted the mundane physicality of the cars. The train, then, was not only a bridge for going and returning, but also an intricately rich social space. For that reason, I somehow enjoy taking the Economy train. Once when I was riding the Economy train, a man holding packs of rat glues walked in from another car. “Indonesia is going to collapse,” he shouted. “Save Indonesia from those rats which are biting our Mother Earth.” Some of the passengers couldn’t hold back their smiles.
I was riding the Economy train to South Jakarta on one night. The seats in the car were all taken, as usual. I stood and read a book. My reading on that day was Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss (2008), a witty travelogue in search of the happiest places in the world. The book does not include Indonesia as one of his destinations, but it does mention the country as an unhappy place, along with Iraq and Afghanistan. I disagree with that. Many polls have shown that Indonesians are among the happiest people in the world. I thought he should have included Indonesia. I stood near a kid, who was among the lucky ones to sit. The train had run for a while, when I realized that he didn’t look comfortable with the seat. Many times, he looked at a man with a hat sitting on the floor next to the open door, facing the city view outside. They seemed to know each other, as the man always replied the kid’s curious stares with commanding gazes, as if telling him to stay calm on his seat. The kid bowed his head. The man’s gazes weren’t powerful enough, though. When the train was about to arrive at the Gambir station, the kid stood up and approached the man. The seat, of course, was taken quickly by another person. Yet, the kid didn’t give a damn, not even looked back once. He, then, sat on the floor next to the man, held the man’s arm, and leaned his head. The kid pointed his finger to buildings outside, and the man told him stories that I couldn’t hear. All that I could listen to were the sounds of the train chugging down the tracks, and their laughs. Perhaps, the happiness of places don’t relate to the happiness of people.
Getting attracted to someone on a commuter train can be a pretty fun experience. The fact that you don’t know her, and that you only have a short time to answer all your curiosities, makes the feeling more intense. There are some recurring stages: the introduction when you start appreciating her look and begin wondering who she is, where she works at, and where she is headed to, the conflict when she looks back at you and you pretend not looking at her but you are actually curious about what she thinks about you, and the climax when she finally gets off the train and your heart breaks in a second. Yet, as soon as you also get off the train—the denouement—life just continues. No hard feelings, no strings attached. Everything is alright. Some people, however, took it too far. Sexual harassments have occurred in train cars so often that the commuter train service company started to dedicate the first and the last cars of the Economy AC and the Express trains for women in 2010. Two years later, the company went further by providing a special train service where all the passengers allowed were women. This special train service was erased in 2013, while the special cars remain until now. Many of my friends, who are women, have actually told me that the special cars are much crueler than the mixed ones, and most of them prefer to get on the mixed-cars rather than the women cars. Many of young women in the car will not give their seats to pregnant women or to the elderly, and when someone asks them to, they can get angry. People seem to have more empathy, my friends say, in the mixed cars. When all the gender-privileged people are in the same space, it seems easier to abandon people with other aspects that need to be privileged. I don’t know how true this claim is. I won’t witness it myself.
Counter-attacking. Evening is the worst time of the day to travel from the north to the south of Jakarta, as bad as morning is for the reverse track. The chance one will get a seat is so rare that many commuters would prefer going to the reversion direction first to obtain seats before returning to the right direction by riding the same train. Penetrating. The unwritten rule during peak hours is to let the gettingon passengers first and the getting-off passengers second. For the sake of sitting, many of the commuters are so skillful in exploiting narrow door spaces left by the getting-off passengers, that as soon as the door opens, they will hit anyone who stands in front of them and grab the remaining empty seats. Man-to-man marking. Understanding the enemy is the key when the commuters don’t get any. By standing in front of the right people who sit, they can be the quickest to get the hot seat. In Jakarta-Depok train, adults bringing backpacks or holding books have a high chance to get off at Universitas Indonesia Station or Universitas Pancasila Station. Public workers using government employee uniforms might get off around Gondangdia Station or Djuanda Station where the government offices are located around, the same stations where people who look like they are going to travel far will drop off, as the intercity Gambir Station is nearby. Meanwhile, people with formal work shirts are likely to get off at Manggarai Station to change to another train running to Sudirman Station, where the skyscrapers are around. No-look passing. Keeping seat is as tricky as getting one. It’s not merely about luckiness or smartness; it’s a psychological battle. Many commuters might try to challenge others’ empathy. The most common trick is to avoid looking at the other passengers craving for seats. There are ways to do that, among others by reading books, by listening to music and getting busy on phones, or, the most effective one, by pretending to sleep. Space-making. Regardless of the intricate seat politics happening on the train cars, some commuters simply bring their own small folded chairs and sit like bosses. In the Economy train, many people went crazier: they sat on the roof of the train. The absence of air conditioning utilities enabled them to sit “comfortably” on the roof. These dudes were called the atapers (“atap” means roof). They even had a social community group among themselves.
Recently, a friend, a scholar in urban planning, wrote a Facebook status: In a public discussion about the Sydney Metro project, Sydney civil representatives criticized the authority’s plan to operate Metro during peak hours with the density of 4 people per square meter. The representatives thought that the density was too high and the authority should provide extra trains so that the density could be reduced. This morning, I counted briefly the density of the Jakarta-Bogor Commuter Line is 9-10 people per square meter. He took the Commuter Line train service, which replaced the previous threeoption division in 2013. To put the number into perspective, the area of a single bed would be 1.8 square meters. Thus, what he is suggesting is that in the commuter train, 10 people stands in an area of around half of a single bed. I wouldn’t have believed the number if I hadn’t ridden the commuter train during peak hours. At those times, the only great thing is that you won’t need to hold anything around to keep you stand firmly. People are everywhere around that your body won’t be able to move significantly, even when you try to. I have experienced moments when my feet couldn’t step completely on the ground. And, in the Economy train, which cars were without any air conditioners, this could get really sweaty and nasty. In those situations, I would console myself by thinking that every cloud has a silver lining. The art of being pasrah is to push negative things up to its positive limit. Nevertheless, I think New York Times journalist Randy Kennedy puts it beautifully when he writes that commuter trains did not only give us not the power of speed, but also the gift of proximity, a gift that changed the city fundamentally and forever. “The subway made us sit together. And stand together. And, of course, wait and sweat and swear together,” he says. “Every day, subway riders, find themselves inches from people with whom they would not willingly choose to share a long city block.” The close proximity inside train cars can be a truly depressing situation. But they are, perhaps, the few places in the world where you can be so close to strangers, without feeling strange.
My first commuter train ride happened in 2007. That was also my first time traveling to the south of Jakarta on my own. My family has lived in the same house in North Jakarta since I was born. We rarely went to South Jakarta. My parents had no business there. So did I, until I got interested in studying at a well-respected public university in Depok, a city on the southern border of Jakarta. When I told my plan of applying there, my mother asked, “Why don’t you go to a closer school?” I couldn’t tell if she protested against the distance or the school, or both. I took the train to attend an open house at the university. I was pretty nervous at first. Most of the anxiety came from what was not in the train. There was no textual information to provide direction, neither there was any audio announcement that would let me know when the train would depart and what the next station would be. There was no air conditioner, and in a tropical city, where you were often treated nicely by well-tempered interiors, that would significantly contribute to the increasing level of whatever negative feeling you were having. The fluorescent lamps inside the train were turned off, and I wasn’t sure if they could really be turned on. Windows and doors were open, and I wasn’t sure either if they could really be closed. Not much were actually changed when the train started to run; no single information was announced and the doors and windows were still opened wide. But, the unobstructed view of the city, along with the gentle winds passing through the windows, pleased me along the way. As the train track in Jakarta were either on the ground or elevated, I was offered the city scenes from a viewpoint that I had never experienced before. Some of them were familiar to me in the beginning, but later I began to not knowing everything. All of the sudden, my city became bigger, and faster. Buildings, vehicles, and people were passing by, and the closer they were, the quicker they seemed to run out of sight. At one point, the train passed the National Monument, which stood far enough from the track to have a generous amount of view time. It was a pleasure to see something familiar after all the unknowns. I spent most of my trip on that day looking out the window. I noticed that I had arrived at the station when I saw its name written at the platform outside. I got off the train. Later on, the trip became a weekly routine during my years as an undergraduate.
The three-option train services were replaced with the Commuter Line train service in 2013. Since then, the train has become much more convenient. All the cars use air-conditioning. They look brighter and cleaner. Illegal activities such as selling and begging are now strictly prohibited. And yet, I felt a big loss. The Economy train had been its own world to me. I had experienced from the extreme good to the extreme bad of it, from people laughing together to people being mugged, from social sensitivity to selfignorance, from gracefulness to nastiness. The street musicians, sellers, and atapers were gone, along with all its dramas and intimacies. It should be that way, anyway. Regardless of the romantic ideas, a commuter train is just a mode of transportation. Its main mission is to provide speed and comfort to all passengers. Its space isn’t meant to be social. And since the change, Jakarta’s commuter train has been providing speed and comfort in a much better way than before. I realized this after taking several rides on the Commuter Line train. The scene, where most of the people on the car are transported to other places virtually through their phones, has become more usual. That is exactly the sign of a good service in any transportation mode: when you’re physically stuck in a transitory space but you don’t mentally feel being in one. I experienced it many times, too. When I was on the Commuter Line train, I couldn’t help recall some of my experiences on the Economy train. But, as quick as the train passed, those scattered memories slipped past. Perhaps, my purpose of writing this is to preserve them as stories before, and beyond, its death. So that they last.