Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 398 posts

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#171

Post by eaksa »

ecshafer wrote: post #14
ghaff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also imagine a lot of people who are admiring these megacities have never been to one. Jakarta has oceans of scooters and, when I was there to visit some customers with our country manager, she had a driver. With some exceptions like Singapore, SE Asian cities are horrible to get around.

Other than Singapore. I am not sure why SE Asian cities aren't going as all in on mass transit like China. Jakarta has a single subway line for 42 million people. They have some light rail line and buses. If you compare this with Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing its really night and day.

Jakarta doesn’t have one metro line. It has 9 lines which it variously calls light rail, commuter trains, etc. but are metro lines in all but name, in terms of frequency, infrastructure, and service patterns. It’s not quite Beijing or Tokyo, but it’s also not as wealthy as either city.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#172

Post by refurb »

paxys wrote: post #161
refurb wrote: post #111

I always find discussion of the world biggest city a bit of a pointless exercise considering it’s entirely dependent on how administrative lines are drawn. Highly fragmented metro areas are regarded as smaller than consolidated metro areas, whereas they might be the same size overall.

These rankings always consider city to be a contiguous metro area, regardless of how internal lines are drawn. Otherwise most of them wouldn't show up on the list at all. "Los Angeles" for example has close to 200 indiviudal cities.

That is true for this report, based on the methodology

https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...

However, instead of an arbitrary administrative definition, they used an arbitrary cutoff for population density.

Thus it still comes down to a subjective drawing of lines around the city.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#173

Post by skx001 »

b112 wrote: post #6
skx001 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The West just refuses to build anything. Whereas in Asia its not uncommon to build entire cites from scratch.

Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations. It's also easy to have cities grow fast, if you're primarily a rural/agrarian nation, and suddenly have a transition to become urban. This was (for example) Canada in the 1900s. Mostly rural, yet now it's mostly urban. Canada saw fast growth of cities back then. It's maintaining large cities…

> Yes, it's easy to build entire cities from scratch in a centrally managed society, such as a dictatorship or communist nations.

I would like to pushback on this assumption. I made that point because you mentioned Canada and its rapid immigration rise in the last 5 years. Western countries, namely Canada can do a lot to build more to ease the pressures on its housing demand.

Vast amounts of land is available to build amazing cities. There are specialist architect firms that can plan the most beautiful, walkable, livable, affordable cities very close to major hubs and metros currently.

In the 50s/60s/70s these very Western countries, spent a lot and built all kinds of infrastructure which led to meaningful increases in quality of life and perhaps created the most prosperous generation in these countries.

Even now when any government in the West wants to really do something, they don't really care about anything and it gets done, the money magically appears, the votes are found no matter how unpopular it may be. But for some reason building infrastructure, housing, mass transit has been completely forgotten.

The real bottlenecks are governance, bureaucracy, and NIMBYism. Like a few comments above pointed out, its keeping boomers happy with their high property values at the expense of the young.

Some things just don't make sense to me as an outsider. A few examples I read recently.

[1] It will take three decades to turn an 18-mile stretch of the A66 road in northern England into a dual carriageway. [2] It will take 20+ years just to add another runway at Heathrow London and cost $64 Billion Dollars! [3] While Dubai is building a brand new whole airport for $35 Billion, I think the worlds largest when its finished.

Nearly all of the political problems in Canada, UK, Australia and much of the US (NYC,SF, etc.) will completely go away if they had the "Build, Baby Build" attitude. Just build housing like there is no tomorrow.

There is no such thing as an "oversupply" of a basic human need, livable shelter.

I can assure you, knowing how Asian countries like China approach governance, Chinese cities will have no major issues in 50+ years. Any outstanding issues will will resolved well before they start to become a problem with various 5-10 year plans. The same for Malaysia, Singapore etc.

[1] https://archive.md/PcOZV

[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-chooses-heathrow-airport...

[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/29/dubais-ruler-ann...

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#174

Post by decimalenough »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #98
decimalenough wrote: post #17

I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok. Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the langua…

Thanks for posting this. Really interesting perspectives Whats the food like for vegetarians/ vegans?

If you're strict or allergic, very difficult. Fish sauces and pastes like terasi and patis are culinary staples on the level of soy sauce and make it into otherwise seemingly vegetarian dishes.

If you're willing to flex a bit and just avoid obvious meat/fish, you'll survive, there's plenty of tofu, tempeh, veg etc. Gado-gado is always veg, nasi/mee goreng, etc.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#175

Post by decimalenough »

projectazorian wrote: post #104
itake wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not too polluted Are we talking about the same Bangkok? I'm talking about the Bangkok in Thailand where they literally shut down the schools due to air pollution being so bad [0]. What Bangkok are you referring to? Malaysia is wayyy cleaner than Indonesia, both in air quality and trash on the ground. [0] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/24/bangkok-pollut...

Bangkok has seasonal haze incidents that can get bad enough to close schools etc. Those are a scourge across all of SEA and are generally caused by slash-and-burn agriculture practices. It's much different from having bad AQI year-round. I'd hardly say Bangkok is a clean air capital, but it's next to the ocean with no significant mountains nearby so usually pollution gets blown out to sea.

> it's next to the ocean with no significant mountains nearby so usually pollution gets blown out to sea.

So is Jakarta, and it's still pretty polluted.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#176

Post by wisty »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #112
rafram wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of. Indonesian had Jawi, based on the Arabic script. People in today's Vietnam mostly wrote in Chinese AFAIK. Those methods of writing were dominant among the people who could write. But the populations were mostly illiterate, so it was easy for colonial administrators to supplant the existing writing systems with Latin as they introduced European-style schooling.

How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese? I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages , with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.

Like Korean and Japanese it has a different grammar and vocabulary. Japanese added a bunch other characters and Korean just made up a new (phonetic) script.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#177

Post by decimalenough »

bogota69 wrote: post #48
decimalenough wrote: post #17

I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok. Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the langua…

Bangkok is not what you described. Bangkok is a great city, not too polluted, there are not a lot of poor people. Bangkok is like Manila. I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia. The cleanest city is without a doubt Singapore.

For me Manila is the uncontested worst city in SEA. All of Jakarta's downsides, plus an absolutely horrific airport, worse traffic, extremely limited public transport network (which doesn't extend at all to the places where most business travellers go, namely Makati/BGC), higher crime and more violent crime too (lots of guns around), and worse food.

About the only upside is that most people speak some English, which is manifestly not the case in Jakarta.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#178

Post by stickfigure »

decimalenough wrote: post #17

I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok. Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the langua…

> lunch at the Italian place in the Ritz-Carlton was under $10

I'm curious, what does a beer or a glass of wine cost?

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#179

Post by peyton »

decimalenough wrote: post #17

I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok. Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the langua…

The nightlife is wildest in SEA but definitely for the bold and brave.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#180

Post by stickfigure »

lurk2 wrote: post #54
superconduct123 wrote: post #13

I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media

They don’t have a huge culture industry yet (or at least, not one that appeals to English-speaking audiences), but they’ve become a lot more prominent on the internet in the last 5 years due to better infrastructure and integration into various English speaking social networks (via both social media and people travelling in and out of Indonesia). It’s a Muslim majority country and very conservative, so a lot of the t…

> both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries

Korea definitely, but China? Seems like most of China's modern cultural export came from Hong Kong, and even that has stopped. Conventional wisdom is that the Three Body Problem couldn't be published today.

I'm curious what (homegrown) Chinese cultural products are internationally competitive today. China seems to be punching far below their weight, considering their population and their economic position.

Post reply on HN