Moaz from TRANSIT was invited to speak at NST’s CrossTalk along with Traffic Consultant Goh Bok Yen. The discussion was published in the New Straits Times on Saturday, 23 May 2009.
The discussion can be found at this link:
CrossTalk: In KL, the car is king
As always, your feedback and observations are welcome.
Transit Malaysia 
3 replies on “CrossTalk: In KL, the car is king”
Touching on Goh’s comment about how the LRT is the most inflexible and being able to do more with stage buses, I guess he was promoting the ease of shifting bus routes in response to demand. For short term, this is Ok, but it’s too reactive in the long run where we should instead be dictating where traffic demand should turn up.
Holistic traffic planning involves planning for land uses and economic activities around each stations. I guess I’m touching on TOD already here. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen any physical urban planning job in Malaysia which hires economists, sociologists or real estate grads. But this is another issue, for another time ….
We agree with your observations.
Urban planning is something that we are looking into as part of our public transport proposals. The problem that everyone is facing is, it is tough to change minds.
And after that, how do you undo all of the choices that have been made, the infrastructure that have been built, etc?
There is a lot of information to be gathered and a lot of challenges ahead – but it is a very important task that we cannot ignore.
So to start, can you gather as much useful info as you can find on TOD and holistic urban planning – and we can upload the info to our website. If you have weblinks, share them with us and we can load the links onto our site, create a new category of links, a new category of postings, etc.
Regards,
Moaz Yusuf Ahmad
on behalf of TRANSIT
I concur that urban planners here are working with a hand tied behind their backs and they are trying to make the best out of a bad situation. When they are already facing many hurdles in managing traffic alone, delving into urban redevelopment may be too much to ask for at this juncture.
I haven’t had any literature on TOD so far, just a general report on transit. You guys may want to take a look at what Minneapolis has done about bus lane. I experienced it first-hand in a jam on I-35W a few years ago:
http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=38941
(This is a second post since the earlier one didn’t seem to work.)