Transit Malaysia protests against the recent downgrade of 29 RapidKL bus routes to Rapid On-Demand Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) services. This service cut, labelled as restructuring, coincided with a fare increase for DRT and its exclusion from RapidKL’s unlimited travel passes. These actions highlight failures by the government at all levels to address years of neglect in urban bus services and low ridership.
Worldwide, DRT is touted as a solution to provide adequate service coverage for sparsely populated areas that can’t be effectively served by buses. DRT can also be a stop-gap solution in disconnected neighbourhoods that can’t be currently served by standard length buses, such as Bukit Antarabangsa and Taman Kemensah, where built-up density has increased beyond what the steep and tight local roads can handle. However, the areas in Klang Valley where buses are replaced with DRTs have density levels that are considered sufficient by many worldwide cities with wide public transportation usage to be served by higher capacity vehicles such as articulated buses and trams.
Additionally, vehicle unavailability and complicated trip logistics associated with DRT make it unreliable during peak demand compared to fixed-route bus services, which always provide space for passengers regardless of the traffic situation. The government’s bus-to-van downgrade decision is regrettable in the absence of statistics on unfulfilled DRT trips due to capacity and scheduling issues. Previous experiments in Singapore with small shuttles ended within a couple of years and showed that the public preferred reliable and frequent bus services instead.
We urge the government to invest more to reverse the degradation of the urban bus network by decades of car-centric planning. A functionally complete bus network needs a slew of infrastructure solutions that prioritise bus and pedestrian movements over cars and reconnect neighbourhoods segregated by manmade barriers such as highways and gated developments.
At the very least, from a social equity standpoint, the government should protect the affordability and coverage of public transportation from degrading further. Instead, My50 passholders affected by the bus-to-van downgrade need to fork out an extra RM2 for each local trip. Despite the increase in high-rise development and road traffic pressure, no road map has been offered to these affected communities on how DRT should rightfully transition to a higher-capacity inter-neighbourhood public transportation that improves urban liveability in the long term.
In an aspirational scenario of a fully functional, dependable and complete urban bus network, a van-based on-demand service can never replace a fixed bus route service on a cost-per-passenger trip basis. The Klang Valley bus network has been anything but useful to a vast majority of road users, even before it shrank by 13% due to the ongoing bus-to-van substitution. The government needs to be transparent on why the DRT downgrading has been occurring, backed up by hard data and financial justification. It should also explain why it chose to set its bar so low, as to seal a short-term DRT bandage, over an ongoing stage bus operational bleed that is only symptomatic of a more chronic state of affairs of urban transport neglect.
Transit Malaysia,
9th February 2026
Transit Malaysia 