Monorail ridership to increase with new trains next year
RAPID Rail is confident that the daily monorail ridership will increase to 65,000 passengers or more once the company completes the decommissioning exercise replacing its ageing fleet of two-car trains next year.
Its chief executive officer, Abdul Hadi Amran, said commuters could also look forward to improved services with shorter waiting time once all 12 sets of four-car trains came into operation.
At present, he said, KL Monorail service comprised five sets of four-car trains and another five sets of two-car trains, which were operating at a frequency of 6.5 minutes.
“Based on the new contract, the delivery of the four-car trains replacing the fleet of two-car trains will arrive from March to December next year.
“Apart from boosting the capacity of passengers, the number of daily ridership for our monorail services will also experience an increase with the new sets of trains,” he said here yesterday.
During its peak in 2015, the average daily ridership services reached 65,000 passengers before the figure fell to 36,000 passengers last year.
“So I think it is not impossible for us to raise the figure (average of 65,000 passengers daily).”
The daily ridership, he said, had declined further to an average of 19,000 passengers when the Movement Control Order (MCO) followed by the Conditional MCO came into force.
Hadi, however, said he expected the number of daily passengers to increase after almost all sectors resumed operations during the Recovery MCO, which came into force on June 10.
He had accompanied Prasarana chairman Datuk Seri Tajuddin Abdul Rahman for a briefing at Wisma Monorail before visiting the monorail depot in Brickfields here.
Present were Prasarana Malaysia group chief operating officer (operation) Muhammad Nizam Alias and group chief technical officer Datin Norlia Noah.
Tajuddin said: “The five sets of two-car trains are 17 years of old. Prasarana hopes the new cars will improve Monorail services.”
It was reported that Prasarana Malaysia and Scomi had signed a new deal for the refurbishment of the five four-car train sets and the purchase of new four-car sets in April last year.