Street Smart Technology
Platform based ride-hailing is a form of technology that habits within a certain assemblage of physical and social infrastructure. Going beyond the more commonly employed “product-market match” approach, this excerpt aims to illustrate a “technology-habitat” match. Such a habitat is made up of a rich mix of conditions, which warranted the use of motorbikes to become taxis in urban Indonesia — which indeed boasts a set of conditions that are revealingly parallel, if not identical, to most other Southeast Asian metropolitan areas.
As much as it is impossible to pin down the exact time and place where the first ever pengojek took a ride, studying Indonesia’s last decades reveals that the practice of offering motorbike rides for hire existed as early as the 1970s and the number of ojeks on the streets suddenly spiked up to its present-day scale in the late 1990s due to the massive lay-offs (Lee, 2018). These lay-offs from factories, offices created a disenfranchised class in search for an immediate job — hence the informal market for urban transportation and street food proliferated rapidly. Although, what is notable is that such crises and mass unemployment spikes have occured is so many other economies across the world before and ever since, but very few have resulted in the creation of such a robust street economy that circulates around motorbikes. Building on Claudio Sopranzetti’s (2018) identification of four main conditions that enables the proliferation of motorcycles for public transportation in cities, I propose to draw a certain typology, or in other words an ideal habitat for street economy based technology companies like GoJek and Grab can thrive within: A lax mode of public administration that enables a robust street economy to prevail; a gridlocked traffic infrastructure caused by lack of public transportation options; the availability of affordable motorbikes and smartphones; and lastly, a vast supply of labour, typically internal migrants caught within a perpetual presence in the informal economy.
Condition 1: Public Non-Administation
An example of an essential detail within the genesis of the pengojek is the certain lax mode of governmental administration, which is indeed widely prevalent across Southeast Asia, arguably excluding Singapore and Brunei, that enables urban informal mobility to become mainstream. The practice of ojek driving is based on many layers of informalities. Neither the national nor local governments ever consider ojek as a formal activity on paper — nevertheless this practice is seen both as a solution for urban mobility problems, and as a robust means for job creation. In often jammed cities like Jakarta, Bandung and Denpasar, ojek has become as a vital need for citizens seeking for means to travel between public transport nodes. In spite of its mostly unregulated nature, this long standing practice thrives on an unwritten understanding between the government, its users and its labourers.
During my interviews with Go Jek drivers in Bintan Island, I have frequently came across the “no accident no police” principle. According to many Go Jek and taxi drivers, the police only gets involved with the traffic flow when accidents occur, demonstrating the temporal nature of the rule of law. Also in Bandung, I have noticed that both ojek and gojek drivers avoid the improvised police checkpoints after 11 pm, which is typically when the nightlife winds down and most rides are taken from the central Jalan Braga area. Police was seen fining multiple drivers, for reasons like not wearing a helmet. The informal urban mobility market in Indonesia does not only enable the gig economy to thrive, but also, expectedly, enhances ground-level corruption as well. As an example in the Riau Islands, the Indonesian Navy, in collaboration with the local police, reportedly “administers” the port area pengojek bases through imposing certain fees to be able to operate in that space — which are in a sense informal taxes that tend to hover around 5000 Rupiah per day.
Grab workers in Jakarta, September 2018.
Condition 2: The Key to the Gridlock
In parallel to many other historical capitals of Southeast Asia, Jakarta is also a fundamentally amphibious city, one that is carved up around a port and built upon former canals that were the expressways up until the 20th Century. Unfortunately in any conversation regarding modes of transportation, contemporary Jakarta is not known for its now non-existing canals but rather for its notorious traffic, that is commonly ranked either the worst or one of the worst depending on which survey and year one chooses to observe.
In a study that was recently published by Go-Jek itself, it was revealed that approximately 45% of metropolitan Jakarta is unreachable by a public transportation stop, which represents an area covering about 300 million square meters out of a total of 655 million square meters of metropolitan area. The Jakartans’ key to open this gridlock is the ojek — the motor-taxis that flow through cars stuck on expressways like water flows through seemingly merged layers of stone. The founding legend of Go-Jek also refers back to this unassailable use case of the ojek, where Nadiem Makarim has his eureka moment while whizzing through clogged Jakarta traffic in destination to his office job.
Black is areas that have access to public transport. Blue areas at least 500 meters + away from the first public transport node.
Condition 3: Cheap Hardware
As much as there may be an informal market and an urban setting itching for a motor-bike related solution, as long as the devices themselves are not feasibly available to the mainstream buyer, the ojek mass in urban Indonesia would not have reached its critical point. An average cost of new motorbike in Indonesia hovers around $1000 USD and tends to be offered with comparatively (to ASEAN countries) low tax rates and with instalment options for payment. Prices and payment options tend to be even more accessible for ojek drivers, as they typically drive second hand bikes and rent the bikes from familiar bike-shops in any urban setting. Almost all locally produced and Japanese branded, motorcycles in Indonesia therefore tend to cost around a third of a yearly income of a typical ojek driver (which I estimate to be around $3000 USD ~, according to fieldwork data), making it a feasible capital to invest in for a swift turn around rate. There are also reports of Japanese companies such as Suzuki offering GoJek and Grab preferential rates of rentals and wholesale purchases, driving the costs even lower.
GoJek driver in Jakarta, September 2018.
As well as motorbikes, street smart technology requires a widespread use of smartphones, a condition that Indonesia reached around 2015 — right when GoJek built its mobile application after operating as a call centre for almost 5 years. In 2013, an estimated 24% of mobile phone users in Indonesia owned a smartphone (which represented around 25 million people out of 100 million total users) and this figure doubled exponentially to 53% by 2017, representing more than 80 million smartphone users, most of which reside in urban settings. The key reasons for such an exponential spike in Indonesian smartphone user base was the introduction of Chinese low-cost smartphone brands such as Oppo in the domestic market during the early 2010s, and the increasing affordability of data services. These two market forces widened the reach of mobile technologies to the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ across Indonesia.
Condition 4: Precarious Labour
In regards to the demographic composition of the pengojeks, it can be observed that the labour pool of informal mobility in urban (or peri-urban dwellers, orang desakota) Indonesia is built upon a vast supply of domestic migrants, moving in typically a circular or seasonal urban-rural migration chains. It has always been much easier to become a pengojek than finding a formal job in a new setting for a migrant, but Go-Jek and Grab further brings down the entry barriers as they lessen importance of local geographical knowledge (for navigating the traffic) and social capital (to be able to sign up for the job): “Grafting technologized knowledge onto what “locals” are supposed to know intimately, that is, the city, enables outsiders and new migrants to no longer learn the city in the old way. The ojek was once a superior resource of local geography. Ask and you shall receive a complex and knowledgeable answer of turn left-left-right-left-right. How is the man of the street to compete with Google Maps’ ability to either make the city legible?” (Lee, 2018).
Through the deployment and training of smartphones, mass recruitment events and ease of access to relevant social connections over social media, becoming a pengojek is hence rendered much easier than ever — creating a positive network effect where the supply of more drivers incentivise more users as the waiting time and prices for fares are dramatically reduced. Beyond geographical knowledge, for many Indonesians, regardless of their urban or rural upbringing, the learning process of driving a motorbike starts almost concurrently with when they start walking, as in one interview with a pengojek the author noted the phrase that Indonesians tend to “…wear the bikes like [they] wear shoes (…sepeda seperti sepatu)”. It is no exaggeration, given how agile yet seemingly comfortable (albeit with serious physical pains induced through tough and persistent labour) they are in using the motorbikes in one of the world’s most (if not the most) chaotic traffic flows. This mainstream knowledge of motorbike driving is also a key advantage for both the migrants in terms of minimising their potential job training and also the companies which “partner” with them, maximising the relevant and available labourer pool.
Onat has been Regional Director for Southeast Asia at wamo Technology Ltd., (a UK-licensed fintech startup) since the beginning of 2020. He ‘s also been working on Gojek as his PhD case study at the National University of Singapore since the summer of 2017. His love for QR codes began during his time in Shanghai and he’s tried his best not to carry cash ever since.
