Jakarta. In less than 24 hours, Indonesia’s outgoing leader Joko “Jokowi” Widodo will leave office after ruling the country for a decade. Jokowi's 10-year tenure has marked a series of significant milestones in infrastructure development, including the construction of Southeast Asia’s first high-speed railway.

Last year, Jokowi inaugurated the China-funded Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed railway. The $7.3 billion rail, also known as Whoosh, has recorded over millions of passengers to this day. The project has caught the attention of other countries with fellow ASEAN member Vietnam mulling to build its very own high-speed rail. 

“Whoosh is the first of its kind in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. … It marks the modernization of our mass transport that is efficient, eco-friendly, and is integrated with other modes of transport,” Jokowi said when launching the high-speed rail project last October.

The high-speed railway enables people to travel from the capital Jakarta to Bandung city in just 45 minutes. A single trip starts at around Rp 300,000 ($19.39). 

As of September, about 5.8 million passengers had tried riding the railway that can travel 350 kilometers in an hour, according to the project’s consortium Kereta Cepat Indonesia-China (KCIC) on Friday. Whoosh reported that it could now serve up to 22,000 passengers in a single day, a massive jump from just 8,000 passengers in Oct. 2023. Whoosh now serves 48 trips in a day, marking a 242 percent increase from just 14 trips when it first started.

The 142.3-kilometer railway is part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. This initiative, which is the centerpiece of Xi’s foreign diplomacy, sees China making colossal infrastructure investments across the globe. The China Development Bank covered 75 percent of the total costs to build Whoosh, while the rest of the money came from the consortium’s own funds. 

The government is mulling extending the tracks to the East Javan capital of Surabaya. The time efficiency that the Whoosh project offers gave Jokowi a bonus point for his 10-year leadership. A recent survey by Indikator Politik Indonesia revealed that the public found the transportation to be satisfactory. The overall public transportation satisfaction index stood at 3.962 on a 1-5 scale with 5 being the highest. 

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