Suroboyo Bus — Plastic-Bottle Fare Transit

Suroboyo Bus opened in April 2018 as a city bus line whose signature draw was trading plastic bottles for a ride — three large bottles, five medium ones, or ten cups bought a two-hour ticket — run by Surabaya's Transportation Department under a buy-the-service contract with operators including Perum DAMRI. Since May 2022 that swap has moved off the bus: riders now hand bottles to staffed exchange posts around the city, or bank points through the GoBis app, for a travel voucher, while the standard cash fare (Rp 5,000 general, Rp 2,500 students) does most of the work of keeping the line running. The bus network itself has grown steadily — from 3 routes and 8 buses at launch to 15 routes and 39 buses by April 2025, and to roughly 873,000 recorded trips by October 2019 — but riders still pay a higher cash fare than in some other Indonesian cities because Surabaya has not matched their level of central-government fare subsidy, and 2025 reporting described subsidy costs climbing against ridership that local officials called stagnant.

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below — how this works · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-02

📖 Terms in this entry: Bus rapid transit (BRT) · CBTC (communications-based train control) · Congestion pricing