It’s a sunny day, the perfect time to do city tour Jakarta, look around, and shopping maybe. You were coming down to the lobby to reserve a taxi but none is available. Then you go outside, you find “angkot” (a public transportation using mini bus), but there is no AC and it’s too tiny for your long legs. You look around, you find a Transjakarta Bus Shelter. It might be not a bad choice. When it is your first time in Jakarta, maybe you don’t know much about Transjakarta Bus. But do not worry, I will tell you some basic information about it 😉

Transjakarta Bus Shelter

If you find something that looks like this shelter around you, it means that you are lucky. You can get around by riding Transjakarta Bus. The Transjakarta Bus Shelters are spread around in all of the tracks in Transjakarta Busway corridors. You can check about the corridors and what shelters they have in here.

Before, you can buy paper tickets in those shelters using cash, but since 2014, it’s all changed to a cashless system, which means you have to get an e-money card to buy tickets. It’s applied to almost all of the bus shelters, but some place still take cash because the lack of some equipment. The ticket price for one person is IDR 3.500 and you don’t have to pay again when you change bus with different corridors.

Types Of Transjakarta Buses

There are three color types of Transjakarta Buses that I found. One of them is a combination from red, yellow and orange, the other is combination of white and blue, and the last one is completely in gray. It is different depends on what corridors they run in and what kind of fuel do they use.

“Transjakarta Bus” or “Busway”?

When a phone rings inside the bus and the opposite end of the phone ask where is the position they are at the present time, one who picks the phone often say it, “I’m still in the busway”. Actually, that is not the correct sentence, grammatically, because “busway” is referring to the bus lane that the bus crossed, not the bus. But since, English is not a first language and “Transjakarta bus” is too long, it’s already become a habit for Jakarta citizens to use the “busway” term.

Now that you know a little bit about Transjakarta, you can start your first city tour Jakarta experience in riding it. Maybe if you speak some Indonesian and your Indonesian friend called you and ask, “Lagi di mana? (Where are you?)” you can reply it with: “Masih di busway (I’m still in the busway).” Enjoy your ride 😉

Tips : Do you want to take Transjakarta ride just for once? Actually, you do not need to buy bus card if you dare enough to ask for help. You can ask local people to use her/him bus card and then you simply give him/her cash for exchange. It works for me many times!