About Us

This site was created by two guys frustrated by the traffic jams they experienced every single day in Jakarta: Dien Kwik (myself) and Hindra Irawan.

If you look at my profile, you can see that I live in cibubur and have first hand experience of going through bad traffic jams at any time of the day. Well that's an exaggeration, but I think it's pretty close to any time of the day...

Hindra lives in Bogor and is fortunate enough to miss the cibubur traffic. However, as everybody else living in Jakarta can attest, you can never avoid traffic jam, no matter where you live in Jakarta.

In any case, we thought we could at least do something about it, rather than just cursing about it. We ended up starting two things.

The first thing we started was this bebas macet community/social network site. Rather than just ranting amongst the two of us, we thought we'd get more people in the rant party. Well, ofcourse it shouldn't just stop at ranting, but it'd be nice if we can all share tips, tricks, news, insider information, etc, related to traffic jams, road constructions, why such and such thing is not built, or when it is going to get built, potholes, detours, alternatives, and on and on and on... We can also start something useful, such as local groups, discussing issues relevant to each individual immediate communities, or perhaps car sharing groups, etc..

The second thing we started was FireAnts. The dream of FireAnts is to be able to provide real-time traffic information, anywhere, anytime to commuters on the roads. With FireAnts, a commuter need only to fire up their FireAnts application on their handphones, select the regions they're interested in and see live traffic condition (up to the last 15 minutes) presented the form of visual jakarta map with color coded streets, representing traffic conditions on those particular streets. We will be sharing what we can share about FireAnts in the bebas macet community site as well from time to time.

With these two things, we hope to be able to make a little dent in the "coping with traffic jams" moments in our lives. In any case, please help make this site useful by sharing your own experiences and by suggesting features that we may be able to add.