Car mania and shoddy work put us on a road to nowhere

 

Many of you are on the road today, and it’s likely many of you are caught in some humongous traffic jams. I hope your bladder and bowel are in good working order. Oh, and your car too!

However, I can tell you there are other places in the world where traffic jams are far worse. Cairo and Delhi make KL look, well, like a walk in the park(ing lot).

So much for selective comparison. But how to fairly judge and compare?

Remember this – we’re not a poor country struggling to pay for transport infrastructure. We’ve enough resources and shouldn’t be comparing ourselves against the poorer nations of the world.

But not with Singapore either, which is just one big flat island where they build roads without levelling hills or digging tunnels (unless they want to because they’re kiasu). They don’t have terrible floods or need to build highways to cut off communist terrorist supply routes as we once had to do.

I certainly don’t want to be accused of supporting a DAP plot to bring in Singaporean culture, such as following speed limits and obeying traffic lights, to supplant Malaysian culture where everybody, including Singaporean motorists driving here, don’t.

The fairest way is to look at the money we’ve spent on transport infrastructure and what we got from it. Malaysia’s traffic maps would show a misleadingly rosy picture of our investment returns. They show our transport infrastructure as world class, until we look closer.

Always under construction

Here’re some examples. The main road in my area has been under construction since like forever. When the 2018 general election produced a new federal government, I thought perhaps the new lot would do something about it.

A pandemic, a few governments and more prime ministers later, the project is barely completed.

The quality of what was completed is poor. The construction process mostly involved occasionally bringing equipment and workers to do something for a few days or weeks, followed by months of inactivity and neglect.

On top of poor construction and project management, there’s poor design. The new junction near my home is so badly designed my car tires scuff the kerbs daily while rushing through the traffic lights that never seem to take actual traffic conditions into account.

Nearby is another set of absolutely unnecessary traffic lights, where some cleverly-placed U-turns would have met the needs better. As we Malaysians love to say, perhaps somebody up there has shares in traffic light companies.

Dangerous drains

Further along, where the road is being widened, the alignment of lanes is so bad that cars are forced into dramatic manoeuvres just not to hit each other. Mark my words, accidents will happen there.

Accidents have happened at the newly-built drains further on literally within weeks of completion. Their jagged edges would split a safety helmet, much less a head wearing none. Parts of the drains just hold water back rather than channel it away.

And don’t get me started about street lights not built where they’re needed, or built but not turned on, or turned on but went out and were never repaired.

The North-South Expressway is easily the best constructed and designed highway we have. Its entry ramps, exits, rest areas etc are spacious and its construction (though not the more recent repairs) was the best among other similar projects.

Being the country’s first major tollway and blessed with lots of free space probably helped. But more likely, it was designed and built in the days when pride and professionalism still mattered. Those days are long gone by the look of things.

Today even brand new expressways are of such poor quality they can make your car airborne or smash it to the ground with their many “instant” potholes, gaps and sinking surfaces. And ironically, regardless of the amount of time you save using them, you lose it all back in the congestion at their entrances and exits.

And there’s the concrete! What is it about our fetish for concrete towers and flyovers and even fully elevated highways? Most are absolutely unnecessary – you’d be forgiven for thinking these people must have shares in cement companies too (and they probably do).

Most toll highways aren’t profitable, but they’ve now become must-have toys for the rich and well-connected – to own a highway or two as a status symbol, and to let the government bail them out when they lose money.

Who’s going to pay?

Too many Malaysians don’t pay for the public services they get and so don’t care about their quality. There are always politicians who’d want to pander to them in return for their votes, and who’d just extract more money from the “haves” to please the “have nots”.

Here’s a brilliant solution that I know will get nowhere. Property owners who pay next to nothing in local council taxes and assessments must pay more. Not so much that they’d face hardship, but enough to make them care about what their local governments are doing.

Getting things for free builds a sense of entitlement and apathy, the famous Malaysian “tidak apa” attitude.

But another reason why we’ve so much bad traffic congestion is this – we’re a young, relatively prosperous nation with many – myself included – being the first in our families to own a car or to pay taxes and rates and assessments.

We won’t keep the car at home and we’ll drive it even if it means being stuck on paid highways for hours daily. Let the people of Stockholm or London take public transport – we want our cars!

It’s more of a social and psychological issue than anything else. Owning a car is a mark of success, and we’d rather die on the roads in showing them off than leave them at home. It’ll take a generation or two before we wean ourselves off our motoring mania.

In the meantime, be prepared for more potholes and jams and crawls on the highways and byways as we sit in our fancy, hard-earned pride and joy going mostly nowhere!

I have plenty more to moan and whine about Malaysian traffic. Keep a look out, but don’t hold your breath. - FMT

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