MMPT in the Community
NEW PARADIGM OF TRANSPORT PLANNING APPROACH
IN INDONESIA AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
The new paradigm of urban development acknowledges the concept of empowerment of the society. Public involvement should start from planning, and continue with decision making, implementation and supervision of the development process. Therefore, it is essential to regulate public involvement, in order to guarantee that the society empowerment process runs well.
The mentioned paradigm should be defined and formulated in such a way that it can provide finances necessary to develop a city or a region. With this regard, Law No.22 of year 1999 is not enough, but has to be accompanied by central and local government regulations (”Peraturan Pemerintah”, and “Peraturan Daerah”).
The scheme of a community based development is not only to introduce public participation in the development process, but also to encourage people in term of controlling Master Plans (land use and transport), urban planning in general, and urban infrastructure, which should reflect the integrated needs of local communities. Since these needs are sometime contradictory, and private sector participation, if not conveniently regulated can become a threat, to minimize disputes there is the need of prominent points.
Public participation in NGO can be developed further to implement innovative projects for satisfying social needs. Primary attention could be concentrated in building local community character and behaviors, social economy, and developing working groups. If these working groups can enhance people quality of life, then it is not difficult to find honest, cooperative, and hardworking persons collaborating in these groups, and qualified persons can always develop and produce innovative programs, based on social needs. We can see, however, two main problems, which stand on the way of the process implementation:
1) Can local government guarantee the implementationl, which is based on the needs of a low class working group?
2) Have local communities sufficient knowledge of their right, and are they able to get their needs fulfilled?
In order to guarantee public participation, there is the need to measure public participation and public involvement in community based development. Based on the experience of Dewan Kota NGO in Palembang, concerning a “public inquiry for Palembang strategic scenario”, mostly the society still hesitate to participate. This is related to the fact that many people believe that a public inquiry will not help to solve their problems.
Transport Regulations in developing countries are weak in many cases. Learning from developed countries is a good idea, but adopting totally the remedies from developed countries can be misleading. Regulation should be made, interactively communicated with the stakeholders in home countries. Local transport expert should detect and make a good sense. The weaknesses of regulation in developing countries are not strong in academic draft; mostly they are not based on the survey and not strong in power to put people in jail if they break the law. Both problems are rooted from the local parliament that is not competence in producing regulation.
In terms of Developing transport regulation, transport policy, and organization, the community based development as it is shown in the following figure is recommended. Why this framework is recommended? Because, in this system new approach of decision making is introduced, where stakeholder, experts and government are acknowledged as important actors. Then, they are all involved in discussion about implementation of Transport Planning (Lay out and Financial), discussions of stake holder forum regarding Transport Planning Policy, and finally in the process of adjustment with Regulation/policy.