The Grinch Behind the Wheel

The first time I drove a car in Jakarta, I buried the front end of Phil's Kijang under the rear bumper of a clapped out Metro Mini half a km from her driveway. It took 30 minutes and six guys bouncing on the hood to pop 'er free. That was June 1999 and I've basically not driven a four-wheeler in the city since.
Until now.
After much hemming and hawing, I've rented a 2006 Innova - a ubiquitous mid-sized Toyota MPV - and driver on a month-by-month basis: the days of her-pregnant-self sucking on bus fumes while trying to flag cabs in the rain @ 7pm are over. The ride come bundled with a driver - Pak Hakim - who appears to be a lovely unassuming 50something from Bekasi who giggles like a Japanese schoolgirl. We'll see how long it takes to break him of that habit as he adjusts to the world's worst backseat driver riding shotgun in a city of 1.5 million vehicles, most operated by unlicensed mouth-breathers who have sorted out clutch, brake and gas pedals and little else.
I've had 'er out a couple of times now, getting acclimatized & all that, and while it's early days I have picked p a few things in a decade of ojek and taxi travel here. Negotiating the streets of New Jak City is different than the highways and byways of Whoville where a social compact exists and certain clear conventions are taught (driving school/graduated licenses etc), enforced (traffic laws, armed co-commuters) and rewarded (relative safety of the journey, dawn coffee @ 140kmh etc).

(pic lifted from: http://allworldcars.com/wordpress/?p=11866)
The Jakarta driving experience requires a rewiring of Western neuro pathways, conventions and protocols. Like shoals of smelt, flights of swallows and a myriad other naturally occurring phenomena, traffic flow here is a classic reshaping of what psychologists call 'Emergence', a surrendering of the will of the individual to the wisdom and survival instincts of the collective, which allows novel and coherent structures to emerge as patterns and properties in complex systems re-organize themselves. In other words, the emergent system is much more than the sum of it parts.

In practical terms it means the Jakarta traffic Jedi can dispense with checking rear- or side mirrors, blindside etc, accommodating merging vehicles or considering any impediment more than two car lengths ahead on the understanding that the collective will see him through.

Braking to allow a fellow motorist to cross your bow provokes a symphony of horns as the lane behind accordions: better to roll ahead, ignore the interloper till he or she secures the suitable sine wave and squeezes through.
The problem with the emergence is that it is predicated upon something beyond obedience, something more like surrender: the life of a single anchovy means less than nothing in a school of tens of billions. Its loss to a humpback whale or blue shark equals nothing.
Such is not the case, and even the most masochistic, deferential Javanese driver is still hardwired for survival. And, stupidity. He will not pull over for an ambulance or fire truck, but will brake - indeed often does - for no apparent reason whatsoever. He will pull over and park in the slow lane in order to sit and pluck single hairs from his chin oblivious to the massive jam it causes - part of the larger national blind-spot about the principle of cause and effect. S/he will drive 30 kph in the fast lane of the toll road, and 130 kph in the breakdown lane. The bar sticking out of the steering column that activates the windshield wipers is handy, but the other one... well it makes something tick and a light flash on the dashboard but for a case of kratendeng he couldn't tell you why and what for.
Nature didn't plan for idiocy or self-preservation so Jakarta's emergent system, nice as it is for fish and birds, doesn't work very well. How the Grinch will fit a square peg hammered into maturity on the mean streets of Montreal into this round hole remains to be seen. I can report that the wheel lock tucked under the driver's seat is a bit light, but it's one of those comfortable shorties that are quick to deploy and great for use in tight places... like traffic jams.