These jams are driving us to the wall

 In Europe, you can see ministers taking the bus or subway. But Malaysians love their cars, fuelled by their aspirations and subsidies.

You must have noticed that our roads are being invaded by motor vehicles on a scale never before seen. The roads are jammed every day as if due to flash floods or long festive holidays or official events by VVIPPs – Very Very Important Pompous Persons!

Or just as likely, some idiot Malaysian motorist decided it’s a good time to have a car breakdown or a road accident, creating massive traffic jams, which happen pretty much all the time.

Luckily for me I’m retired and live outside Kuala Lumpur, so I can choose whatever time I wish to enter the city’s traffic hell.

Lately, however, it doesn’t seem to matter what time I choose, as I’d still be crawling on the road along with the thousands of you.

I hate traffic jams and crawls. Thank you Captain Obvious, I hear you say. You’re welcome folks. But I love to drive and by my own estimate I have probably clocked up over two million kilometres in the 45 years since I bought my first car.

Here’s one example of how I got there. For one five-year period my work commute was almost 200km a day, including passing through 14 toll booths. And yet because my route was mostly in the opposite direction to the main traffic flow, and skipped the inner city, the time I spent on the road was quite reasonable.

Sure, I spent more money on fuel and tolls, but I still came out ahead: land was cheap where I live (I get to plant durian trees in my yard) and my mortgage payments were smaller than those of most people; the savings easily covered the extra expenses.

I’m a morning person and would be in the office around 7am even when my office was in KLCC. I’d miss most of the jams and get to switch on the office lights and have a leisurely second breakfast.

The cleaning folks left me alone, something I much welcomed because my office colleagues, especially the bosses, never did.

Home and away

I would have hated working from home – a place for homely stuff such as planting trees and watching wildlife: wild boars, monkeys, water monitors, squirrels and the occasional snake that comes to steal my fruits, as does the occasional human when durians are in season.

I have other things to keep me occupied at home, such as a workshop where I work on my old junk that keeps falling apart because of the heavy amount of driving. My youngest car is a 23-year old Toyota, though I occasionally inherit younger cars from my wife.

I go back to Penang for visits and “makan” quite often, some on day trips that cover over 800km to and fro, literally the distance from Johor Bahru to Bukit Kayu Hitam.

So, give me the open road and spare me the jams and crawls – but, alas, it seems jams and crawls are on the menu and won’t go away any time soon, at least not for another generation or two.

New roads and expressways now appear as if by magic. A gazillion tons of concrete goes into flyover, bridges and ramps because, as Malaysian lore has it, the fathers of our highway planners apparently own cement factories.

Our road routings as well as the roads themselves are often poorly planned, built and maintained. I can’t prove it but the aforementioned highway planners – or perhaps their fathers – must have seen their job as a challenge to defeat Waze and destroy our vehicles.

It’s not totally their fault though. Our expressways are a licence to print money for the well-connected who over-bill construction costs and write themselves lopsided and lucrative toll deals.

Some expressways don’t even connect to each other or do so only in seven dimensions. That’s not something the owners care about much.

Some highways started deteriorating almost from the moment they were opened. In a few places along the west coast of the Peninsula you have to make a slow approach to bridges which, though built on top of solid piles, have subsiding, unpiled road surfaces that will literally launch you into the air and then slam you back to the tarmac.

My cars are decades old so I don’t worry much about that; a few choice swear words and off I go. But if you have one of those fancy cars, then the experience could result in expensive visits to workshops and chiropractors.

System failure

Malaysians often blame the traffic congestion on a poor public transport system.

While public transport has improved a lot over the last few years, it still requires some sacrifice in the last mile, a sacrifice most Malaysians are loath to make.

Certainly, our weather isn’t conducive to walking. The heat, noise, pollution and especially the humidity make such excursions unpleasant. Then there are the Malaysian drivers who, in their quest to kill each other on the roads, occasionally kill those of us who are just walking beside the road.

But the real reason people shun public transport is a psychological one – many Malaysians, including myself, are the first generation to afford owning a car. Car ownership is an aspiration and the pride many Malaysians have in their metal chariots are not to be trifled with.

Scratch their precious car and it’s like you’ve insulted seven generations of their ancestors. Expect mayhem to follow.

Who can blame us then for wanting to drive our cars even if other options are available? We’d rather park on Jalan Tun Razak during rainy rush hours than leave our cars at home.

European countries built better public transport systems and many people often leave their cars at home – the result of good planning and enforcement, high taxes and a high cost of ownership; also, when you’re a third or fourth generation car owner, and your society has made all the car mistakes to be made, you’d be rather unimpressed with the need to own and drive a car.

The political impulse

In Europe, you might come across a government minister or two taking public buses and subways. Not so in Malaysia: our politicians must have taken a secret oath to constantly drive on busy highways during rush hours with blazing police escorts. Don’t expect them to do anything to slow down car ownership and usage.

Between 2024 and 2025 we added over 800,000 new private and commercial vehicles – excluding motorcycles – per year while taking away very few through retirement and accident. That’s great for the economy certainly, but not great if you’re a commuter.

And then we have cheap fuel, which (if you’ll pardon the expression) just fuels the problems. We’re too generous with subsidies, resulting in people taking cheap fuel for granted.

Electric vehicles would help with the subsidies and the pollution certainly, but it’ll be a few more years before we see the full impact.

A former boss, a Scandinavian, thought nothing of taking the LRT until well outside the city centre where his driver would wait to pick him up.

That’s a very rational thing to do, and easy for somebody who came from a country where people do this as a matter of routine.

Throttled by our desires

But this doesnt happen with Malaysians. We love our cars. We’d rather be in our car and waste our life away in jams than not be in it every moment we could.

We would rather complain about the traffic jams, poor public transport, the weather and politicians rather than adjust our lifestyle.

At some point we would change our behaviour. Better public transport, more hybrid working, electric and self-driving vehicles for hire, and less subsidised fuel would see to that.

But while waiting for that, you can retire and plant durians in your yard. But be warned, even in the boondocks where I live, high-rises and new roads and shopping malls are appearing like mushrooms after a rainy day.

We’re importing the traffic madness of the big cities. There’s no escape.

Soon, it will probably be easier and faster for me to do a day trip to Penang rather than one to KL and back. By then the city would be just one gigantic parking lot. Captain Obvious would be better off staying at home and guarding his fruit trees. - FMT

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