Jakarta Fails To Put Out Smoking On Buses

dregar:

If only Jakarta had put the same effort in stopping public smoking as it did in cracking down on beggars, then maybe it would be a much healthier city. The article pointed out:

Smoking is continuing on nearly 90 percent of public transportation vehicles in the city, despite a four-year-old bylaw banning lighting up in public places, the Indonesian Consumers Foundation said on Thursday.

This is yet another example that the city only enforces certain bylaws it wants to enforce and ignore the rest.

This is interesting: the city only enforces the laws it wants to and ignores all the rest. Compare this to London. When the English government banned smoking in enclosed public spaces, there was an initial outcry from smokers’ lobby groups, such as Forest, which called the ban draconian and complained that it would be “impossible to set up a private club run by smokers for smokers.” God forbid that!

On the other hand, owners of pubs, bars and restaurants, managers of offices and factories, plus an overwhelming majority of citizens supported the ban. It came into effect on July 1, 2007, and had immediate results. You still had your odd whiff of smoke every once in a while, but a year into the ban it became extremely rare. The authorities cracked down hard on business owners who tolerated indoor smoking, in addition to individual offenders.

But today, over two years into the ban, you hardly ever hear about problems. It’s as if the ban polices itself. It’s a case of a society enforcing a law it clearly wants to, to the extent that its violators do more than simply breaking a law: they brand themselves unfit for society.