Affordable transport system needed nationwide — MP

KUALA LUMPUR (Sept 25): To cater for the transport needs of the entire nation and not just this city, a more affordable mode of transport than big infrastructure would have to be adopted, a conference on social cities was told.

“Traffic congestion doesn’t just happen in Kuala Lumpur, it happens in many secondary cities too,” said Liew Chin Tong, the chairman of the Research for Social Advancement Policy Institute.

This requires hard political choices to be made about resource allocation, Liew, who is also the member of parliament (MP) for Kluang, told the Social City 2 conference last Tuesday.

Referring to a Neilsen study in 2014, Liew noted that the country has the third highest per capita car ownership in the world with 93% of households owning at least one car, and 54% owning more than one car.

“In Malaysia, even with such a huge ownership of private cars and motorcycles, the transport needs of women, students, the elderly, children, the disabled and the very poor are not catered for adequately,” he said in his keynote address which was distributed to the media yesterday.

With 11 million registered private cars and another 11 million motorcycles, Liew said in Malaysia, “most of the poor have cars, and if they are poorer they are on motorcycles”.

“Of course, the economic cost of owning cars is very high, too. Often, young families in the city spend a third of their income on instalments for car loans, petrol and maintenance, thus depressing disposable income which can be spent in other parts of the domestic economy,” he said.

Buses and some forms of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) have to be part of the solution, he said. Noting that Kuala Lumpur had 1,500 buses in 1985 when the Klang Valley was only one-third of its current size, he pointed out that there are less than 1,000 buses in the wider Klang Valley area now.

“Ultimately, a well-connected system has to solve the ‘last mile’ question first before buying big toy infrastructure,” he said.

This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on Sept 25, 2017.

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