Holiday highway chaos crushes feel-good initiative

 

Did you wonder about the highway toll holiday that the prime minister announced for the Hari Raya season? Those seeking a motive generally agreed it was a “feel good” initiative by the Ismail Sabri Yaakob government.

There were even those who suspected that the “sudden” declaration of Hari Raya on Monday was a populist move to facilitate a five-day weekend break.

I won’t comment on this because what is more critical to highway users is the breakdown of the Peninsular Malaysia road system, if only for a weekend, because of ill-thought out decisions by national leaders.

The North-South Highway and the East Coast Expressway were well and truly jammed this weekend because of the toll-free days granted by the government.

In the hectic weeks leading to the Hari Raya season, PLUS had created models of the anticipated congestion on the highways from the combination of the ending of Covid-19 travel restrictions coinciding with the Hari Raya holidays.

PLUS issued travel time advisories almost as soon as the government announced the lifting of travel restrictions.

But when Ismail announced toll-free days for the weekend, PLUS and the transport ministry were among the most concerned by the cascading effect this would have on peak traffic. People would be rushing back to work and to take their children to school on Monday (May 9).

As expected, there was chaos. All the highways have been jammed since Friday. Petrol stations on highways bound for the Klang Valley ran out of fuel because this was a 1-in- a 100 year kind of traffic peak.

The cost of popularity

So if this was planned as a present to highway users, I don’t think the 200 motorists who were reported to have run out of fuel on the highway were thankful to the government.

Also, these toll-free days will cost the government about RM50 million in compensation to PLUS, says a PLUS manager.

“What is the point of giving toll-free days when the traffic is going to be bad because of the ending of the pandemic SOPs and the week-long Hari Raya break?” asked a former highway electrical engineering contractor who declined to be named.

“Even though it was toll free, highway users still had to stop and tap their cards. This stop-n-go procedure isn’t practical,” he said.

If the point was to ensure a congestion-free toll plaza, the toll-free day was not the way to do it, he said.

Accept that jams will come at festive seasons

Perhaps it is time for the government to address the notion that a barrier-free toll plaza means the end of congestion.

I think we should accept that there will be 5-10 festive days a year when a motorist will take up to 30 minutes to clear major toll plazas during a traffic peak.

It isn’t feasible for the works minister to demand that toll plazas be designed to be congestion free every day of the year. This will be too expensive in relation to the low density of motorists during the remaining 97% of the days of the year.

If the minister and the government are thinking of the good of highway users, and they want to do things that add value to people’s lives, perhaps they should look at the monopoly of Touch ‘n Go, the dominant payment system on PLUS and other major highways in Peninsular Malaysia.

New market for TnG e-wallet

TnG has been pushing hard for the RFID payment system because a successful engagement with highway users would land them five million or more new e-wallet account holders.

However, RFID deployment hasn’t gone as well as expected and now TnG has launched a new card with near field communication which you can top up from your smartphone.

The problem is that TnG has run out of stock of this new RM11.00 card. Also, it appears that this new card cannot be uploaded yet by iPhone users.

The scalpers are out there on social media selling these new NFC-enabled TnG cards for as much as RM70 each.

Because of the monopolistic nature of TnG, don’t expect stocks of the new card any time soon just as it was so hard to buy SmartTags from official channels, until a local manufacturer started selling licensed SmartTags under other brands such as LokaTag and Maxtag. - FMT

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