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Jakarta Streets to Pave Way for Smart Card Déjà Vu

Monday, May 05, 2008

by Adi Tedjasaputra

Self-serve Parking Payment is the latest buzz on the streets of Jakarta, Indonesia. Promoted by the Jakarta City Administration and the Jakarta City Parking Agency, a new electronic payment system is still currently under review. The new system is expected to enable motorists pay for parking fees with the use of Smart Cards.

"The new system will require Smart Cards. People will just swipe their card through a machine on the street to pay parking fees," said the agency's Deputy Head, Udar Pristono as quoted by The Jakarta Post last week.

Smart Card was first introduced as a technology that requires a contact area to transfer electrical power and communicate with Smart Card Reader. In the evolution of Smart Card, Contactless Smart Card was introduced. Using inductive coupling technology, Contactless Smart Card can transfer energy from a Smart Card Reader and activate the chip in a Smart Card without the need of physical contact.

déjà vu
/day&ulzh;aa voo/
· noun a feeling of having already experienced the present situation.
— ORIGIN French, ‘already seen’.
Compact Oxford English Dictionary

For the patrons of some streets in Jakarta, Smart Cards are not new. In 2003, the Jakarta City Administration appointed PT Adiwira Sembada as the sole contractor to run a parking pilot programme in several streets in Jakarta, while a Singapore-based company, Epecom Technology & Distribution Pte Ltd, formerly known as Gimexore Private Limited, provided full system integration for the pilot programme. In addition, INSIDE Contactless, which is headquartered in France, supplied Smart Card chip PicoTag and contactless springboard modules Hand'IT for handheld readers.

Swamped by operational problems, the pilot programme using Smart Cards known as "Kartu Kontan" was eventually declared as a total failure. The Jakarta City Administration officially terminated the operational collaboration between the Jakarta City Parking Agency and PT Adiwira Sembada in November 2003 after about six months of pilot programme launching. The equipments that cost about $2,000 per unit were rendered useless.

This year, with a new concept of "two parking operators, one parking system", the Jakarta City Administration will likely to appoint two private parking operators. The two operators, one of them is PT Adiwira Sembada, were recommended by the Jakarta City Council to manage parking in Jakarta streets, as reported by The Jakarta Post in January.

The new self-serve parking payment system operated by the two parking operators is expected to increase revenue of the Jakarta City Administration from parking fees. For the operation of the new parking management units, the Jakarta City Administration has initially allocated Rp 40 billion ($4.3 million) budget.

The writer is the Founder of RFID Asia - The Prominent RFID Community in Asia.

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Labels: card, indonesia, jakarta, parking, payment, rfid, smart, smartcard, technology