Surabaya, Indonesia: Day 7

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Pedestrian and Bike Infrastructure

This post could be quite short: there is none.

However, while broadly accurate, it’s not quite fair, so I’ll try to be a little more descriptive than that. I’ve been picking my destinations for evening walks based on whether there is a decent way to walk there. I’ve gotten very spoiled in Minneapolis, and I expect to be able to walk somewhere without constantly needing to wander into traffic or run the possibility of falling into an open sewer. 

Basically, I’ve lost my sense of adventure as a pedestrian, and Surabaya has helped me rediscover it.

I have no idea how someone with even mild physical handicaps would navigate this city. There are few crosswalks, no walk/don’t walk signs, every curb is at least a foot tall with no cut-outs, and with the exception of a few broad boulevards with decent sidewalks, most sidewalks stop and start without warning and/or are intermittent and half-rotted unstable pieces of concrete laid over sewers running a couple of feet below the side of the roadway. Heaven help you if you are walking down one side of the street and see something you’d like to check out on the other side. You basically have wait for the torrent of cars and scooters to ebb slightly so you can wade through, trusting that they’ll slow down enough to let you by.

There just really aren’t any significant number of people who try to get around without a car or scooter, which on one hand I can totally see why, but on the other that creates a chicken-or-egg scenario where the infrastructure is terrible, so no one walks or bikes, or are cause and effect reversed? Do scooters and cars not respect the presence of pedestrians because all drivers are assholes, or does everyone seem like an asshole because there’s really never been a point of looking out to avoid pedestrians because they’re so rare?

Another side effect is that there’s no real way to be an effective bike commuter, so all bike shops and visible aspects of bike culture are centered around racing and triathlon. Which is a bummer, because in a city this size, there should be plenty of people to support a bike scene that doesn’t fetishize carbon components and lycra clothing, but that’s pretty much all there is. I did see this beautiful LeMond bike at a coffee shop called Wdnsdy, though:

Scooter culture seems to be much more diverse, by comparison, and seems to claim some of the territory that would be occupied by cyclists in a community with more viable transportation options. Scooters are used by everyone from the young, loud-pipes-save-lives show-offs to families of four carting around groceries to workers/vendors who need to haul huge amounts of stuff with them. That’s probably worth its own post, so I won’t go into more detail on that at this time.