Transit Malaysia welcomes the proposal from the Minister of Federal Territories in Parliament. We hope the government will move forward with the decision and not backtrack on a potentially game-changing proposal. This proposal, which we suggest should be renamed a “Decongestion” Charge, is one huge step towards making green, efficient and people-friendly forms of mobility (including public transport and mass-transit) prevalent, transforming Kuala Lumpur into the great city it always had the potential to be.
General Sentiment
Currently, one of the most common sentiments with regard to the decongestion charge is that our public transport is in bad condition, and must be improved first before the decongestion charge is implemented.
Transit Malaysia has always welcomed and supported efforts to improve public transportation in Malaysia. Since 2008, we have called on the government to expand bus lanes in cities like Kuala Lumpur alongside increased investment in buses. While some might say that a congestion charge before improving public transport is putting the cart before the horse (or the “kereta di hadapan lembu”), we feel that the implementation of a decongestion charge and the upgrading of public transport can run concurrently. The mass transit network in KL now has 12 lines; with additional funds sourced from the decongestion charge, the government can invest in acquiring more buses and rolling stock, strengthen enforcement of bus lanes in cities and provide additional maintenance to the mass transit network.
For comparison, Singapore implemented their first congestion charge, the Area Licensing Scheme, in 1975. This was a whole 12 years before the first section of the North-South Line from Yio Chu Kang station to Toa Payoh station began service on 7 November 1987.
The idea that congestion charging must come after public transport is improved is simply a way to push off the congestion charge into the future so that it becomes someone else’s problem. Meanwhile, Malaysians and KL-ites have to deal with the problems of chronic traffic congestion every day! This is why we refer to this charge as a decongestion charge; as seen in Singapore, Stockholm, London, Paris and New York, decongestion charges lead to free-flowing roads, decreased air pollution, and even less heat in urban areas. Congestion charging is one of the most impactful travel demand management tools that major city-regions can use to overcome the negative externalities resulting from excessive private vehicle use.
Valid Concerns Among The Public
While TRANSIT Malaysia warmly welcomes the proposal, there are valid concerns worth addressing.
- Congestion pricing is one of the most effective tools in addressing the current structural funding inequity that penalises public transport users
The portion of our federal, state and municipal budget that goes to support the operation and maintenance of our vast networks of urban streets and thoroughfares eclipses the subsidies that go into our most basic urban bus and rail services. This is coupled with our car-oriented infrastructure development policies that have baked auto dependency into the way our cities are budgeted, designed and built through excessive parking and free-flow traffic requirements. As a result, our first last mile connectivity is hindered due to the policies in place. The average taxpayer who chooses to ride the bus is effectively subsidising another car-riding taxpayer despite the latter’s disproportionate use of public road spaces, whose costs to maintain and provide is equally shared by the former (i.e. the pax/km cost of providing and maintaining the road infrastructure for a car user is at least ten times greater than a user of a bus on a dedicated lane, even though KL’s bus lanes suffer from lax enforcement.)
Corrections to these structural deficiencies would require a massive budget overhaul. Congestion charging can be one of the many great methods to address the budget gap that prevents public transport service and infrastructure from getting to the level that would secure the public’s acceptance of the congestion pricing scheme. As such, we propose a staged pricing strategy that would ensure each congestion fee increase corresponds to the improvement in frequency of urban public transport services that run into the area covered by the scheme.
2. (De)congestion charging opportunities are not limited to the city core
TRANSIT Malaysia would like to remind our policymakers that a fenced congestion pricing scheme, while a good start, is not the only missing piece of our travel demand management puzzle. A scheme that overly focuses on the city centre would jeopardise support from users travelling from the outer urban cores. While residents in downtown KL can easily benefit from the concentration of LRT and MRT lines, residents outside of the city core are faced with not only first and last mile challenges, but also the lack of alternatives for more direct suburb-to-suburb routes. We encourage all stakeholders not to be fixated on any one single approach, considering there are many ways our public transport funding and services can be increased so that the benefits would expand beyond city cores.
TRANSIT Malaysia has always been advocating the redistribution and redesign of our excessively built roadway and highway spaces to facilitate faster and more efficient movements for buses, cyclists and pedestrians. There is no other more sustainable solution in providing alternatives to car drivers. Our gridlocked cities desperately need more sustainable transport infrastructure like sidewalks, crosswalks, bus priority lanes, signals and shortcuts, alongside interconnecting bus routes with increased frequencies. Unfortunately, our lackadaisical attitude in clawing back road spaces from cars to more sustainable transport modes leaves us no other choice but to rely on expensive tunneled and elevated urban rail as the only viable solution, and this restricts our financial capacity to meaningfully reduce our car dependencies.
For example, Metro Vancouver levies 24% tax on all commercial parking to partially cover the region’s expansive public transport services’ capital and operational expenses. Our councils can start with adding a special levy on council-provided parking to collectively boost our regional public transport funding and services so that people are comfortable with taking public transport, even when undertaking discretionary, non-commuting trips. Our dense urban highway network, which slice through dense urban populations, can be made more useful to carry more people through provision of speedier “highway buses” running on priority lanes (with special entry/exit ramps for seamless integration with the rest of the bus and rail network), in return for additional (decongestion) toll charges set by the Federal Government. To realize this, the Federal Government must have enough political will to create a streamlined governance and funding framework that would result in the creation of an Urban Transport Organizing Authority for each major city-region in Malaysia, akin to London’s TfL and Singapore’s LTA.
Conclusion
TRANSIT Malaysia supports congestion pricing as one of the “sticks” that can be deployed, while acknowledging the importance of not forgetting to reciprocally offer the right “carrots” in order for the scheme to be successful. While it is understandable that the carrots currently being dangled can be insufficient, with structural deficiencies that may take decades to fix, we believe that the pilot and phased implementations of the scheme will lead to demands for substantial improvements in our public transport network and its support systems. Ultimately, a greater need for distribution of accountability among different government agencies at different levels will be required, to collaborate towards a unified vision for more sustainable transport funding, provision and adoption in our traffic-choked cities. We hope that the implementation of the decongestion pricing scheme can finally see the light of day soon. TRANSIT Malaysia would be happy to extend our help for any stakeholder meeting before its implementation.
Transit Malaysia 