Transport planning in govt is dysfunctional and in a mess

 

While the debate about highway congestion and public transport is going on, no one has raised the fundamental issue on the cause of the problems in the first place.

Transport minister Wee Ka Siong is correct when he said that the planning of highways is not within his ambit, as that role lies with the ministry of works.

Traffic congestion or providing solutions to the problems are not exactly part of his scope of responsibilities. But is it really the role of the other ministry?

The role of the ministry of works is rather one-dimensional: that is, to build more highways.

They have a highway planning unit to plan federal roads and expressways, and then there is the Malaysian Highway Authority (LLM), whose functions are to regulate, control and monitor all the highways on behalf of the government.

The LLM website does not mention highway congestion or measures to overcome traffic jams in urban areas.

Who looks after public transport?

DAP strategist Liew Chin Tong is equally right when he pointed out that Wee is not looking seriously into the provision of public transport.

That function is not under his ministry either. The transport ministry has an agency called APAD, a legacy of the Pakatan Harapan government.

PH made a hasty decision to close down the land public transport commission (SPAD), reducing it to the public land transport agency (APAD), when they discovered that SPAD was involved in road vehicle licensing and they backpedalled.

APAD was then placed under the transport ministry instead of continuing under the Prime Minister’s Department and placed together with the Road Transport Department not long after.

In any case, APAD was only set up to oversee the issuance of bus and taxi permits, a role they perceived to be as planning for public transport, albeit a minor component as far as public transport authority and planning functions are concerned.

Conflicting roles

Despite the obvious overlapping and often conflicting roles and functions, current debates do not point out or criticise the structural defects that have long existed in the government.

The way the government has set itself up, and the structure within which each ministry is expected to play certain roles and functions regarding transport, is rather poor, disorganised and dysfunctional right from the beginning.

But so far nobody has pointed this out.

The finance ministry has a complete monopoly of not only the overall authority of those corporations, but it has an ability to channel funds off the budget, and appoint its own board of directors and chairman who report back to the ministry.

All these public transport functions have never been shouldered by the transport ministry at all.

But the finance ministry does not have its own expertise to manage these functions effectively, either.

Bearing in mind that these are operational functions serving the public on a daily basis, the finance ministry does not possess the ability to respond rapidly to any given problems where the public are involved, such as accidents and the occasional broken-down train.

The case of the Prasarana LRT trains “kissing each other” was a clearcut example.

The finance ministry lacks technical expertise and in the LRT example, the transport ministry had to jump in and rescue the situation.

But was it really their responsibility to begin with?

Questions, therefore, were raised when suddenly the finance ministry announced the approval of a new ECRL station at Puncak Alam.

Structural defects

It has been the finance ministry’s role all right, but they only took to the task intermittently, when it suited them.

This is what it means to have a structural defect in the operations of the government as to who is taking charge of transport matters.

The individually incorporated agencies that were set up under MoF Inc., to manage all the public transport functions are:

• KTMB (Malayan Railway),
• MRT Corp (MRT Lines 1 & 2 and RTS for JB-Singapore),
• Prasarana (LRT 1, 2 & 3 plus Rapid buses and Monorail)
• Malaysian Rail Link – for ECRL
• MyHSR for High Speed Rail.

Except for the issuing of bus and taxi permits, which is undertaken by APAD, there is very little of a role left for the transport ministry as far as public transport is concerned.

Therefore, to be honest, it is not any particular ministry that is to blame but rather the fragmented way in which the duty of planning public transport and transport systems have been arranged that is the core of the problem. - FMT

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