Heads should roll over LRT disruptions, says consultant

 

Services on the Kelana Jaya LRT line have suffered disruptions, and trains have been running at five-minute intervals at peak hours instead of three minutes.

PETALING JAYA: The top management of public transport operator Prasarana Malaysia should step down following the disclosure that LRT service disruptions will continue until late next year, says transport consultant Rosli Azad Khan.

He said large sums of public funds had been channeled to Prasarana yet light rail services continued to experience regular breakdowns and system failures.

“Is the top management not taking any responsibility for these failures? By convention, the chairman and his board should have resigned by now,” he told FMT.

Rosli said it was also justified to put the blame on former transport minister Wee Ka Siong and former finance minister Tengku Zafrul Aziz.

Prasarana is a government-owned company formed in 1998 to drive the transformation of public transport systems and services. It owns the light rail services in the Klang Valley as well as Rapid bus services in major cities.

Rosli also urged the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) to investigate Prasarana’s procurement processes to find out why the same companies kept getting awarded maintenance contracts but could not deliver.

“The LRT procurement issue is perhaps only the tip of the last government’s iceberg,” he quipped.

On Thursday, newly-appointed transport minister Loke Siew Fook said the Kelana Jaya LRT line had been operating at a frequency of five minutes even during peak hours. The intervals will be reduced to three minutes once maintenance work on 18 of the 56 LRT train sets operating on the route are completed by June.

Earlier this year, then transport minister Wee said the ministry aimed to reduce the intervals to three minutes by November 2022.

Public Transport Users Association president Ajit Johl said the delay was unsurprising given that the trains were used less frequently during the Covid-19 pandemic hence maintenance issues were expected.

However, he urged Prasarana to present a mitigation plan to ensure that at least 60% to 80% of its services were still usable, and seek alternatives such as improving bus service routes or increasing bus service frequencies.

Former Land Public Transport Commission official Wan Agyl Wan Hassan said Prasarana should explore giving “early bird” commuters discounted rates before and after peak hours.

“Set a lower fare or make it free from 6am to 7am, 9am to 10am, provided that the difference is not too great,” he said on Twitter, adding that this may help ease excessive crowding of users during the peak hour of 7am to 8am.

The government could also offer tax incentives to companies that allow flexi-hour alternatives so that employees can commute with public transport and clock in for work at different times. - FMT