Transportation plays a crucial role in our daily urban functioning. The positive side of transportation is undeniable and largely contributes to raise the quality of urban life. Transportation as one of the main infrastructures, brings broad multiplier impacts to the economy by acting both on supply and demand. However, despite the wide range of benefits, transportation contributes to a variety of adverse impacts including degradation of the environment. Such negativity of transportation addresses four major categories of impacts covering both local and global pollution, land, water, air space and material use and other quality of life effects. The key is to optimize the positive impacts and mitigate the negative impacts in order to gain an optimum benefit of transportation. To do so, transportation must be managed and organized in accordance with sustainability principals. Sustainable transport includes three interrelated systems; economic efficiency (profit), distributional/social equity (people) and environmental stability (planet). An emerging trend in sustainable transport policy, among others, is the introduction of a road pricing mechanism. Road pricing is the term used to refer to a system where the road users pay for entering an area or a roadway. The term road tolls and road (user) charges refers to a charge for entering a certain area or passing a certain point on a road. Toll road development has been implemented in Indonesia since 1978 and currently there are about 659 Km. of toll roads in operation. The main objectives of the development of toll roads are to alleviate traffic congestion in urban areas and to support regional growth. Private participation in toll road financing is encouraged due to the government's limited budget for infrastructure provision. That is why most of the toll road development is situated in urbanized areas such as Jakarta. There is a high traffic volume which is financially feasible from the private sector perspective. The study was aimed at exploring two aspects of development (toll roads and the environment). The objective of this study is to study the performance of toll roads, as a road pricing mechanism, towards an environmentally sustainable transport. To achieve such objectives, the research question was formulated as follows; "how is the environmental management organized and implemented in the toll road sector and how does it contribute to sustainable urban transport?" The study is a qualitative research combined with descriptive and explanatory methods. Instruments of the study include a compilation of primary data with in depth interviews with the key respondents directly involved in the development of toll roads and environmental management (purposive sampling), a literature review and a desk study (secondary data includes policy documents, reports and archival data). The study has found that there is lack of emphasis on the environment aspect in toll road development. There is no explicit environmental requirement in toll road network planning or in tender evaluation to choose the private operator. Environmental concern is very much centered on AMDAL (Environmental Impact Assessment) and its implementation while there are still remaining problems attributed to AMDAL implementation. The main problems with AMDAL implementation is poor enforcement. At least three aspects are marked upon the control mechanism. The first issue is the limitation of manpower and financing in both the governmental institutions as well as in the private sector. There is not enough staff in the Ministry to deal with the work load of the projects, and there is only a limited number of staff who have sufficient knowledge and experience with environmental management. Secondly, the reason for lack of enforcement is poor coordination between stakeholders / agencies. This is due to the still evolving and restructuring institutional frameworks in most of the government organizations. Thirdly, is public lack of accessibility to the environmental documents and supervision reports. This reduces the opportunity for the public to actively be involved in the supervision which could compensate for the lack of this action from the government. The main recommendations of this study, based on the findings, are to put more environmental concern in toll road development and to improve enforcement mechanism for environmental management. The first may be achieved by stating environmental requirements at every stage in the development, such as the requirement for private company's environmental certification. The latter can be achieved by reinforcing the environmental institution with improved quality of human resources, making more finances available for environmental supervision or by introducing reward and punishment mechanisms. Regarding environmental impacts of toll roads to urban environmental qualities, this study shows that there is a potential positive contribution of toll roads to the environment by smoother traffic (less congestion) and reduced emissions. However, this positive contribution can only be quantitatively measured due to the complexity of the transport system and limited data on environmental parameters. Overall, the results show that the toll road development emphasis in Jakarta is very highly based on the economic goals and less based on social goals, and even less based on the environmental goals. Keywords: sustainable development, transportation, toll road, road pricing, environmental impact assessment

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Geerlings, H.
hdl.handle.net/2105/12138
Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies

Handayani, A. (2008, September). Environmental management in toll road sector towards sustainable urban transport. A study of Jakarta Intra Urban Toll Road, Indonesia. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2105/12138