Beyond Perceived Compliance: A Mixed-Methods Evaluation of Safety and Security in Ferry Operations on the Merak-Bakauheni Crossing, Indonesia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55927/fjss.v5i3.16Keywords:
Ferry safety, Maritime security, Mixed methods, Regulatory oversight, Traffic Separation SchemeAbstract
This study evaluates maritime safety and security on the Merak-Bakauheni ferry crossing in terms of the implementation of safety standards and facilities, the compliance and awareness of service users, and the effectiveness of oversight by the port authority. A convergent parallel mixed-methods design was employed, combining a 43-item questionnaire administered to 166 respondents with field observation and in-depth interviews. Quantitative findings indicate that the availability of safety facilities falls within the very good category with a mean of 4.21, that passenger compliance and awareness achieved the highest mean of 4.25, and that the effectiveness of oversight recorded the lowest mean of 4.08. The qualitative strand, however, exposed operational risks that these perceptions failed to capture, namely main-engine failure during manoeuvring within the port basin, recurrent outages of aids to navigation, and limitations in crew competence in maritime English and emergency medical response. Triangulation revealed a pattern of divergence between favourable perceptions and technical integrity, convergence on weaknesses in regulatory oversight, and complementarity between strong passenger compliance and gaps in niche competence. The study concludes that the locus of the safety problem has shifted from individual behaviour towards system integrity and hardware reliability
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