A city in need of a new lease of life

Seremban has lost its place to its planned suburb Seremban 2, but careful planning can return it to its old glory.

Seremban today is a city pulled apart.

Its planned satellite section — Seremban 2 — roars ahead as a booming suburb of 60,000 residents and thousands of new homes, but the old city centre is all but deserted after dark.

Over and above that, the daily crawl out of the city to the North-South Expressway and Lekas Highway is no longer just an inconvenience; it is a damning verdict on an urban centre that has squandered its charm and a local authority that has misplaced its sense of urgency.

The new capital at the edge

In less than a generation, Seremban 2, located about 4km southeast of downtown Seremban, has grown into a full-fledged satellite city that functions as the de facto capital of Negeri Sembilan.

Sprawled over a vast landscape are thousands of houses in well-planned neighbourhoods, schools, a lake park, sports complex, and a mall, with wide, multi-lane boulevards offering easy transit.

In Negeri Sembilan, developers continue to place their bets on new townships, commercial hubs, and logistics clusters, and with mega transit projects such as Seremban Sentral providing easy access out of town, jobs, traffic and spending are being pulled elsewhere.

The message is clear: investments, convenience, and opportunities are moving to the edge.

The disgrace at the gateways

The main routes from the North-South Expressway and Lekas into Seremban tell a different story.

What should be a short hop from highway to city has become a daily ordeal of bumper‑to‑bumper queues, chaotic merging and road junctions that can no longer cope with the increased traffic.

While traffic flows smoothly along the six-lane arteries in Seremban 2, it is an agonising crawl past aging shophouses, poorly coordinated traffic lights and badly designed turns into Seremban.

A gateway should serve as a welcoming sign into a city. In Seremban, it cautions people against entering.

A city centre slipping into a coma

Seremban was once a must-stop on the road to Port Dickson. Now, most tour buses power straight through to the coastal town. The old bus terminal now serves only as a transit point, not a destination.

By 7pm daily, the streets have surrendered economic activity to the suburban malls.

New jobs and investments now gravitate towards peripheral projects like Seremban Sentral and the townships. Seremban is now good only for low rentals and daytime errands.

The decay is evident not only in traffic but also in basic housekeeping. Festive lights from Deepavali and Christmas cling on for months along the main arteries such as Jalan Dato’ Sheikh Ahmad and Jalan Yam Tuan, long after the last kolam has faded and the last carol has been sung.

This decline is a policy choice. A series of decisions and omissions have quietly pushed Seremban to the margins while showering attention on new growth zones.

No serious night‑time economy strategy

State and local authorities encourage investments in large-scale projects such as Seremban 2 over refreshing the facade of the historic commercial core of Seremban despite the old city’s strategic location on the route to Port Dickson and its latent tourism potential.

Licensing, enforcement and zoning have not been recalibrated to encourage a mix of eateries, cultural venues and retail outlets that stay open beyond office hours. The Seremban city centre closes early and hands the evening crowd to malls on the fringe without a fight.

The result is a split personality: a shiny, car‑oriented suburban crescent and a congested, joyless historic core that offers neither the charm of a revitalised old town nor the efficiency of a modern city centre.

For residents, commuters and visitors, the signal is clear: one only drives through Seremban, not experience it.

What must be done now

If this trajectory continues, Seremban will end up as little more than a string of junctions between highways and private townships. Reversing course demands political courage and administrative urgency.

The state government and Seremban City Council must stop treating the old town as collateral damage of “progress” and re‑establish it as the heart of a balanced, connected urban region. That requires a plan that starts at the gateways and runs all the way into the streets, shopfronts and parks.

At a minimum, three fronts demand immediate action.

• Unclog the gateways — Redesign critical junctions at the Seremban and Seremban 2 interchanges, add dedicated slip roads for through‑traffic and straighten dangerous curves and unclog bottlenecks.

Synchronise traffic lights and rationalise turning movements along the main approaches into town so that the last few kilometres are not a daily torture.

Build proper park‑and‑ride hubs at the edges, integrated with KTM and the upcoming Seremban Sentral, so commuters can leave cars outside and enter the core by rail or reliable buses.

• Re‑animate the old core — Designate a heritage and lakefront precinct anchored on the Lake Gardens.

Give the one and only A&W outlet a new coat of paint and pave the inner roads to make it convenient for customers.

Ensure the historic market and the area around the railway station are spruced up. Offer incentives for boutique hotels, cafés, galleries and night‑time eateries to stay open late and serve both locals and Port Dickson‑bound tourists.

Introduce a facade and streetscape improvement programme that ties government grants to strict maintenance standards, ensuring festive décor, street furniture and lighting are installed and removed on time, not left to decay on landmark streets.

• Make growth at the edge feed life at the centre — Tie the RM2 billion‑class Seremban Sentral and other transit‑oriented projects to the old grid through walkable links, clear signages and a calendar of events that deliberately pull visitors into the historic core rather than away from it.

Ensure that every major new housing and commercial project in Seremban 2 and beyond is connected to the old town by frequent, reliable public transport, so the edge becomes a feeder, not a rival.

The question is no longer whether Seremban 2 will prosper; that battle has been won.

The real test of leadership is whether the state and city hall are prepared to admit that the current model is broken — that a “city” without a living centre is just an overgrown interchange — and to act decisively so that the journey off the highway into Seremban invites people in, instead of encouraging them to keep driving. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.