Why Bali’s traffic congestion gets worse every year, and how it is affecting tourism
- The Indonesian holiday island’s roads are congested and hazardous, and in popular and built-up areas gridlock frustrates locals and tourists
On December 29, 2023, videos of scores of tourists in Bali abandoning taxis and wheeling their suitcases along a street went viral after a toll road connecting the airport to the tourist town of Nusa Dua became jammed.
For people who live or holiday regularly on the Indonesian island, it wasn’t especially newsworthy. On New Year’s Eve in 2022, a DJ from Australia spent six hours in traffic to reach a party in the island’s south, and literally did not arrive until the following year.
In Canggu, a surf and entertainment hub on the southwest coast, the infamous Canggu “short cut” through rice fields turns into a car park every afternoon as thousands of motorbikes manoeuvre around gridlocked cars.
Things are even worse in Ubud, the temple town made famous by the 2010 Hollywood blockbuster Eat, Pray, Love, in which actress Julia Roberts was filmed riding a bicycle serenely through emerald green rice fields and along winding country roads.
The reality could hardly be more different: every afternoon the main drag turns into a kilometres-long queue of cars. Most of the town’s hotels have given up offering courtesy buses, while scores of tourists have taken to social media to express their frustration.
“I was here 14 years ago and can’t remember it being so busy and [stressful]. I’m so down … I knew Ubud would be busy but not that busy, especially in April. I am travelling for one month now in Bali and I think it’s almost worse than Canggu,” reads a typical post about Ubud on Reddit.
