For Sumatera Infrastructure : Highway or Railway

Abstraksi

In Sumatera there are many remote Kabupaten that still struggle from poverty problems and have limited infrastructures. The road infrastructures that available in that kabupaten mainly are back road. In every year, the local governments in Sumatera both provinces and districts have projects for road infrastructures to build connection among provinces and districts and to reduce poverty and inequality. However, there are some problems that hinder building road infrastructures in Sumatera. First is many national parks and conservation areas in Sumatera and in these parks have a hundred of flora and fauna including endangerly extinct fauna such as Sumatran Tiger and Elephant. If the government build road or highway on these areas it will emerge environment devastation such as an easiness of illegal logging operation. Second, many road accesses in Sumatera that still have street crime such as street robbery. In some cases, people deliberately undermine roads, in order to make a speed bump then they can asking money from every car that pass that roads or even perform street crime. This paper aims to show that building road or even highway in Sumatera are do not fit yet with Sumatera condition nowadays. To reduce poverty and inequality in Sumatera by build connectivity among districts and provinces, Sumatera needs railways than highways. Railways can pass national parks with merely small risk of environment devastation and railways can avert from street crime.