The future of conurbations like the capital of Indonesia depends a lot on how its congestion issues are dealt with now. Anything less could be an environmental, social and economic disaster with real human costs.

Traffic is a necessary feature of any city. Time, work, movement and money are what drive them, their reasons for being. But what happens when a city becomes so stressed and busy that it suffers the equivalent of cardiac arrest, choking on its own traffic and grinding to a halt, its heart no longer able to pump? There are stories of people participating in work meetings via mobile phone from their cars because they are stuck in traffic, and of others scheduling meetings for six in the morning just to avoid it. In these and countless other instances, traffic becomes the force to be reckoned with, a bi-product of work and city life that in the end dictates what people do and when they do it. Jakartans are enslaved by traffic.

Arguably, there’s no such thing as “Jakarta” these days. It’s been years since the city has been distinct from those around it. It is now for the purposes of planners and policy makers better known as the burgeoning conurbation of Jabotabek, or Jabodetabekpunjur or Jabodetabek-Cirangkarta, a megalopolis that, like its acronym, rapidly absorbs more and more towns and regencies in its unstoppable spread.

But Greater Jakarta is also a global city, and its problems are inseparable from its connection to a global economy. And, like all global cities, it is home to massive contrasts and contradictions, and vertical and horizontal divisions, great wealth and abject poverty existing side by side, to produce in effect an almost infinite number of cities, at least as numerous as its inhabitants.

Various solutions to Jakarta’s traffic problems have been posited, some less practical than others. President Yudhoyono’s proposal to move the centre of government to another, purpose-built location in the manner of Brasilia or Canberra, thereby excising the daily life of government from the city’s commercial activities, may provide some relief. But it reeks of abandonment unless substantial amounts of time and money are also spent on major improvements to Greater Jakarta’s transport infrastructure – including extra bus lanes and rail services, and a revival of plans for a monorail network. It has also been suggested that automating the system of toll collection would go some way to improving traffic flow, reducing the number of jams.

This is what allegedly saved Singapore from a similar fate although the differences between Singapore and Jakarta could scarcely be greater in terms of size and planning history.

Clearly the quickest way to ease traffic jams is get cars off the roads. Some ways to achieve that would be to minimize the need to commute by decentralizing the city’s business and commercial activities, and pursuing ideas of “teleworking” or “telecommuting” long popular with urban planners and theorists faced with similar problems around the world. These may not be such effective solutions from Jakarta since they rely on virtual offices either in private homes or neighborhood work-centers, and assuming that the work of most commuters is carried out on computers.

But the forms of decentralization they propose do offer possible ways to alleviate the problem particularly for people living in and around middle-class dormitory suburbs.

Likewise, improving the city’s walk-ability and cycle-ability, while admirable, may not have the same level of impact on traffic problems that it has had in more contained, more-regulated European and Scandinavian cities.

A reinvigoration of the kampong structure that comprised the older metropolis might also have some of the same benefits that the configuration of smaller community units has had in other cities. And, given the obvious attractions of Jakarta, facilitating the development of cities in other parts of the archipelago could at least help spread the population flow towards urban centers in a more controlled manner.

Although lessons can be learned from cities in other parts of the world at other points in history, the problems of conurbations like Jakarta have never been faced before, and the increasingly urban future depends on how those problems are dealt with now. Not dealing with them and letting them run their own course would be an environmental, social and economic disaster with real human costs. Whole lives are already lost sitting in traffic.

Yet the desire for change, if grasped enthusiastically enough, can also yield enormous positive outcomes. Part of this it seems to be encapsulated in the basic philosophy behind the activities of husband and wife team Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina, designers and urbanists whose street art and situationist happenings set out to renew Jakartan’s embrace of their city by encouraging them to see it with fresh eyes.

For too long, they suggest, many Jakartans have wished they lived somewhere else. This has had the effect of distancing them not only from its problems, thereby lessening their sense of responsibility for devising and participating in potential solutions, but also blinding them to Jakarta’s unique character. Its dynamism and cosmopolitanism, the richness of its history, and yes, its possible beauty.

Only when Jakartans fully appreciate their city and learn to love it again will its problems begin to be addressed. But it’s hard to love a place that has you perpetually stuck in a Jam.