Will Selangor abolish highway tolls?

Khalid Ibrahim lost his job as MB because he did not deliver on Pakatan Rakyat's election promise.

COMMENT

One of the issues that was raised against former menteri besar Khalid Ibrahim was his alleged approval of the Kidex and Dash highways.

During the 2008 election campaign, Pakatan Rakyat promised voters that it would abolish highway tolls and would not approve the building of highways on which tolls would be charged. Because Khalid did not deliver on this election promise, he was removed from his position.

While there may be valid arguments regarding this, the issue of toll highways must not be seen in isolation but alongside the master plan for the development of Selangor.

Until the Puchong Highway was completed, it took one hour or more to drive from one end of Subang USJ to the Federal Highway. Subang was practically one huge parking lot in the early to mid-1990s.

Since then, property prices in Subang have spiralled. What used to cost RM200,000 could now be sold for RM1 million and, in some cases, close to RM2 million.

Hence the development of a highway to ease the congestion in Subang did bring some good. And the same happened in other parts of the Klang Valley where traffic bottlenecks were eliminated with the construction of feeder roads and new highways.

While Pakatan Rakyat wants to eliminate toll highways, they must also explain how Selangor is going to handle the large volume of traffic if no new highways are built.

More houses and townships are being built. Car sales are increasing year after year. With more people and more cars, Selangor will need more roads to handle the increasing volume of traffic.

The Selangor government will have to explain how it can ensure that the state will not revert to the 1990s when it was almost impossible to get to your place of work in under an hour for a distance that should have taken less than half that time if not for the traffic congestion.

Politicians have always promised populist policies during elections, such as lowering tax, an increase in salaries and more development.

However, you need money and plenty of it to do all this. So you need to explain where the money will come from. If not it will just end up as empty promises, like the promise to end toll highways with no proposal of how to handle the traffic.

Roslan Bistamam is an FMT columnist.