“Bad sidewalks, motorcycles on the sidewalks. It’s clear what could be done to get people to walk more. It doesn’t come as a huge surprise that people can’t walk much.”

Mr. Althoff noted that Jakarta’s poor air quality also kept pedestrians off the hot streets as much as possible. In some parts of the city, pollution levels regularly surpass the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s index as “unhealthy.”

“At what point do people give up going out because of the air quality and temperature?” he said.

Instead of walking, residents of Jakarta and other urban areas, where more than half the country’s 250 million people live, use cars, buses, taxis and motorcycles to travel distances as short as 200 meters, or 650 feet, instead of walking, according to analysts.

That said, there is also a cultural aspect to Indonesians’ reluctance to put on their walking shoes.

Longtime expatriates, as well as many Indonesians themselves, cringe at a long-established local habit of waiting for an elevator to travel up — or down — a single story in a building rather than take the stairs. This is also true of escalators at Jakarta’s upscale shopping malls, where the international “stand on one side, walk on the other” etiquette is an alien concept.

Then there are the moving walkways at Jakarta’s international airport, which many foreigners avoid because hordes of passengers stand in place rather than take steps. (That is also why Indonesians are easily spotted at moving walkways at the international airport in neighboring Singapore. They are usually the ones standing still.)