BUS LANES KEY TO EASING CONGESTION
TRANSIT (Association for the Improvement of Mass-Transit) notes with interest the government’s proposal to take over the Damansara-Puchong Expressway, Sprint Expressway, Shah Alam Expressway and the Stormwater Management And Road Tunnel (SMART).
It involves creating a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) under the Finance Ministry to finance the selective highway buyouts and reconfigure the present fixed toll structure into variable “congestion charges”.
Unlike highway-based congestion pricing schemes in other countries, there is no suggestion to reallocate highway lanes to make buses as viable alternatives for highway users.
The proposal also fails to address the root cause of congestion in the Klang Valley — disconnected and isolated highways,
land use and public transport planning policies, and governance that work in silos.
The universal principle behind congestion charging is that public roads are a scarce resource that requires a pricing mechanism to ration access.
The highway buyout proposal, however, has nothing to do with congestion charging but merely repeats the approach of nationalising light rail transit and monorail assets without implementing a holistic and sustainable transportation plan.
When a congestion charge was introduced in Central London in 2002, sufficient boost was given to its bus network to give Londoners an alternative to driving.
By 2014, the number of private cars entering the congestion charge zone fell by 39 per cent.
Elsewhere (Stockholm and Singapore), congestion prices are characterised by specific cordoned areas and the availability of alternatives, with the goal of getting people to shift to more sustainable means of transport that make the best use of the scarce road spaces (read: buses).
Traffic congestion will not be solved by the public buyout of the four highways as the problem is spread over a bigger part of the Klang Valley road network.
The bus is a mighty tool used by many city-regions not unsimilar to the Klang Valley to ease urban sprawl-related problems.
The network it runs on is designed to offer competitive metropolitan-level accessibility for people to run their basic commutes and errands.
Unfortunately, Klang Valley’s travel pattern is tied to a complicated pedestrian-unfriendly road and highway network with disconnected high-density developments that make it hard for buses — even under non-congested traffic conditions — to reach passenger catchment areas.
The only way out of this is to reconfigure Klang Valley’s caroriented highway and road network to allocate sufficient bus priority lanes and bus-only access so that travellers can easily switch between highway and street buses to reach their destinations.
There is no single entity in the government that is in charge of overseeing the planning for an integrated urban bus and rail network.
Instead of implementing public and private transport initiatives in silos, the government needs to look into the coordination of all aspects of road, highway, urban rail, urban bus and land use planning.
Transit proposes the creation of the Klang Valley Spatial and Transport Coordination Authority.
Based on evidence of best practices worldwide, public buy-in of highway-based congestion charges largely depends on provision of viable public transport alternatives that can provide carcompetitive level of accessibility and travel times.
For this to occur, the road and highway network must be configured to provide cost-effective and car-competitive local and highway buses, which require coordination across different agencies from different levels and sectors.
Turning existing for-revenue tolls into the congestion-charging concept does not address transport woes in our largest urban conurbation.