YES, WE NEED NAJIB’S MRT BUT WE DON’T NEED HIS CORRUPTION: OVERPRICED CONSTRUCTION LEAVES MRT USERS STUCK WITH OVERPRICED TICKETS

I think I wrote quite a bit in the past about BN’s not so claver strategy to win the hearts and mind of the people.

So this time, let me tell you how the Pakatan people can be not so clever either on that one.

I read this story just now and think that they got it wrong attacking efforts to improve the public transport system,

Public transport ridership falling, despite the billions spent 

It’s by DAP’s Serdang MP Ong Kian Meng

excerpts;

“despite the billions of ringgit poured into these large public transportation rail projects, the overall ridership for the LRT, KL Monorail and KTM Komuter has not increased significantly over the past two years.

As the figures below will show, Najib’s administration should be ashamed that it has spent so much money on these projects with so little apparent benefit to the rakyat.”

For me, it’s silly of Ong to attack the government for spending money to improve the public transportation system.

It doesn’t matter what the statistics at the moment indicate.

No matter what line of his argument is, the government’s initiative on public transport is an issue which the opposition should not have argued.

It makes them look silly.

It’s very much like in the 1980s when Lim Kit Siang attacked Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad when the then prime minister initiated the privatisation of the North-South Expressway project.

Just imagine if Kit Siang had managed to stop Dr Mahathir from doing that one.

If he had his way then – government, rather than private sector fund the project – we would still be travelling on the old trunk road, crawling for hours just to get to nearby places.

Well, even with the highways we still got stuck in jams during festive seasons. Without them, it would be worse.

Even Kit Siang’s son Guan Eng, the weird looking Penang chief minister is now all for privatisation of such endeavours, paying quite hefty sums to consultants just to study his tunnel project and others.

Ong should bear all that in mind before he attacked the current improvement of the public transport system.

Ten or 20 years from now we would likely be unable to imagine how life would be if we still don’t have things such as the MRT.

I really don’t understand why Ong, supposedly being a smart guy that the Pakatan people said he is, tried to harp on this issue which I think will only make the opposition look ridiculous.

Opposing for the sake of opposing, that’s what many would say.

People love the MRT, okay.

Even Dr Mahathir and Tun Dr Siti Hasmah took a ride on it.

It’s as good as those in Tokyo and Singapore.

I believe it’s the way forward for Malaysia to be a fully developed country.

We can’t be developed if we continue to get stuck in traffic jam in downtown KL.

In fact, these improvements should have been done a long time ago.

Really, this is one issue which the opposition can do better by keeping quite as opposing it will only turn off people.

On Ong’s insistence that people are not taking public transport despite the initiative to improve it, he should know that most public transportation projects requires a certain gestation period to be fully utilised.

A friend who is a bit of an expert on this told me that there must be a buy-in process from the public for it and therefore the operators need to first come up with a lot of campaigns to encourage the public to leave their cars at home and use the public transport system.

This take a bit of time, and we should give it that time.

My friend said as an MP, Ong should offer himself to help the operators with their campaigns so that more commuters from Serdang use the public transport system.

“Admittedly, Ong is right when he said efficiency and affordability are issues which needed to be overcome. But that will eventually come if the system has reach critical mass of ridership,” he said.

I have to agree with my friend that it doesn’t help if people like Ong continously derides the operators rather that lending a hand to promote the use of public transport.

– http://lifeofaannie.blogspot.sg/