Increasing the price of petrol is best way to solve growing traffic and pollution problems. To what extend do you agree or disagree? What other measures do you think might be effective?

There are many traffic problems as well as the pollution issue due to the rise of private transportation. It is commonly believed that increasing the price of gasoline is the most effective way. Howeve, in my opinion, there are several actions that more impactful rather than only to increase the petrol price.

On one hand, adding the price of petrol could help increasing the cost of transportation allocation by using private vehicle. In other words, people will find it is pricey if use their private car to go to work. As a result, they will choose to replace the option of transportation mode into the cheaper one, such as mass transportation. It therefore will contribute to the decrease of  traffic jam and pollution problem.

On the other hand, to build the better infrastructure of public transportation would be the better idea to solve the jam problems and environmental issue. For instance, everybody will avoid bumper-to-bumper traffic with choose to commute with train, if only the schedule is reliable and the mode is safety as well as confortable. To explain further, sufficient facilities of public transportation could attract people to decrease the usage of personal car or motorcycle.

Furthermore, having an examplary figure is also significantly effective to embrace people to keep their private car at home and go outside with mass transportation. By this I mean, this figure would be an ambassador of environment-friendly city that could reduce the road density and finally safe the environment by using public transportation. 

For example, Ridwan Kamil as a Major in Bandung has been successful to attract people in that city to using angkot, a local public transportation mode, by going to work everyday using this kind of vehicle. Consequently, it could raise awareness of society to move on to the public transportation.

In conclusion, even though there are pros and cons in this situation, there are more effective efforts to be done to tackling the traffic jam and emission problems rather than only increase the petrol cost. If government pay attention to the development of public transportation and to get a powerful person to be an example, citizen will left their car at home and the issue of traffic and pollution could be addressed.