NPE2

Another Highway in the City

This month another big, elevated highway has been announced, running into the heart of Kuala Lumpur.

The NPE2 would run from Pantai Dalam to Jalan Istana via Jalan Syed Putra. 

But the city is already covered in grey spaghetti concrete highways.  Government ministers, planners and engineers stuck in the 1980's want to cover Malaysia in even more of it.

It takes a severe case of carbrain to see this image and decide what it needs is more roads.

Every new iteration of highway gets uglier and nastier looking with poor design details and jarring blocky angles.  Bad drainage and poor maintenance lead to staining which completes the look.

 

 Funny how just one or two cars are shown on these images, but in reality the roads will induce demand and fill up to the brim within a few years (which is what the business case demands).

What can be done to curb Malaysian developers' insatiable appetite for more elevated urban highways?  How many levels will be enough?  Is it because they can't build flying cars, they feel the need to take normal cars high into the sky on concrete monstrosities?

It's way past time to take things in a better direction.  Adding highway after highway just makes things worse in the long run.

Another Way for the City

There is another way and it's simple: build alternative infra and shift to moving people, not cars.

Scale back the roads in central KL, bring in a congestion charge.  Watch people shift to walking, cycling, buses, and metro.

Build tram lines at-grade.  It works for other cities, why not KL? In this case, build an at-grade tram line along Jalan Syed Putra and Old Klang Road.  We need an alternative vision.  Imagine the convenience of a tram line with regular stops all the way along Old Klang Road, with interchanges at Midvalley, Tun Sambanthan, and up to Pasar Seni. 

Concept for a tram line along Jalan Syed Putra and Old Klang Road.  No need for elevated infrastructure.

 

Malaysian contractor Gamuda is buying trams for Taipei.  Malaysian developer YTL is helping build a new railway station in the UK.  Why can't it be done in Malaysia?

The government spent billions on the River of Life project and now the plan is to dominate it with an elevated highway, destroying the amenity value of the river and undoing that investment.  The highway will pump out noise, fumes and particulates into the city's air. 

Spending billions on all these highways and road projects just locks KL into a future of car dependency.  Obviously a good thing for the toll highway guys...

Fake targets and ulterior motives 

The Malaysian government has targets of 40% public transport share by 2030 and 70% by 2040 for KL.  These are actual targets from the government.  Yet the Works Ministry, part of the same government, is approving urban highways, directly undermining the government target.  So what is the point of the target if they are just going to ignore it?  The government seriously needs to get the priorities in order.

The people behind this crazy American-style highway development need to be un-brainwashed and retrained so they can design and build balanced transport infrastructure for our cities, one that doesn't constantly prioritise cars and profit.

 

 

Does the Klang Valley's metro serve you when you need it?

Disrupted services 

In 2025 we have had so much disruption to Klang Valley public transport services. The causes have ranged from cables being stolen, to Unidentified Falling Objects (UFO's) landing on the track, to security concerns around the ASEAN summit.

Some selected examples from the last few months:

• Six stations along the MRT Putrajaya Line temporarily closed - power supply disruption, 23rd/24th September 2025 (New Straits Times)
• Service disruption on Kelana Jaya LRT line between Universiti and Abdullah Hukum stations - power supply issues, 9th October 2025 (The Edge)
• Ampang/Sri Petaling LRT line disruption at Hang Tuah/ Pudu - 'technical disruption', 13th October (New Straits Times)
• Delays on MRT Kajang Line between Phileo Damansara and Pusat Bandar Damansara stations - 'object' fell on the track, 22nd October (MalayMail) 
• MRT line to Putrajaya disrupted - signalling issues/ cable theft, 25th October (New Straits Times)
• Closure of various stations (KJ line: Ampang Park and KLCC, PY line: Conlay, Persiaran KLCC and Ampang Park, Kajang line: Bukit Bintang etc.) - sudden closure due to 'security concerns' during ASEAN summit, 26th October  (The Rakyat Post)
• Power supply issues at Gombak Sation on the LRT KJ line, 28th October (The Star) 

The Kelana Jaya line middle section is also closed between 6am and 9am most weekends this month (November 2025), as it has been during other months this year already, and closed 6am - 12pm on some weekends.

Are all these disruptions going to continue? What measures have been put in place to protect cables from being stolen in the future? What proactive steps have been taken to guard against power failures?  This kind of disruption can't be seen as 'business as usual' for a major capital city's public transport. For such modern metro lines, all opened well within the last 30 years, there should be no excuses.

Overcrowding

 

Overcrowded stations (and trains) - a common sight in Kuala Lumpur

 

On top of service disruption, commuters regularly have to contend with overcrowding.  There have been problems with train wheel maintenance, meaning trains get taken out of service, but basically it all boils down to inherent design/planning issues.  Kudos to the team at MLPTF for keeping a live tracker of the trains and their current status.  Can Prasarana / Rapid Rail publish something like this officially?  To get better at things we need to see what the problems are, we need to scrutinise them.  That means having the information to understand what is going on, calling for improvements, and holding people to account. 

 

Technical discipline

To get high ridership (and avoid a metro project being a waste of money), public transport needs to be reliable.  So reliable.  This is a science, or a discipline of engineering and management, and it has its own vocabulary. 

• Reliability
• Availability 
• Maintainability
• Serviceability
• Safety

These metrics matter.  

Supply chain, inventory of parts, back up systems, manual operation modes, failsafe, obsolescence management, the list goes on.  It is a discipline that can be learned, applied and developed.  

This is also true for major interventions, not just normal maintenance.  Remember the Ampang/ Sri Petaling LRT line closure from January 2023 to February 2024 (13 months!), between Bandaraya and Masjid Jamek stations? (It happened when an adjacent development affected one of the supporting columns of the viaduct.) In the end the work needed was relatively straightforward, setting the viaduct superstructure back in position on the supporting columns.  But it took so long. Either it was not seen as a priority, or Malaysia doesn't have the skills to do this kind of work quickly.  There needs to be an ecosystem of skilled suppliers who can undertake repairs and interventions with the minimum of disruption to services.  

As the metro lines age, there will be things that need upgrading or replacing, and there will be a need for planned interventions as well as reactive ones.  These can and should be done within narrow windows so that the lines can stay open as much as possible.  Specialists need to hone their skills and get good at this - it may be more expensive in direct costs but there will be much bigger savings by avoiding disruption and the losses in productivity that go with it. 

Area of damage to the Ampang/ Sri Petaling Line near Bandaraya Station (2023/2024) 

Hardworking maintenance discipline and engineering excellence need to be supported by the right culture.  They will not just appear out of thin air...

Positive culture 

The quiet, diligent, hard work of maintenance.  Not the glory of being awarded a project or opening a new development.  Not a handout 'for the people', but the unglamorous work of keeping Malaysia humming along.

Perhaps it's time to change the culture of praise, media attention, and pats-on-the-back at opening ceremonies.  Rate organisations on their record, on their long-term performance.  If you don't do so well this year?  No award.  There's always next year.  Do well?  Get commended.  And crucially - do badly?  There will be consequences.  (This of course needs to be done with open, transparent data with no room for manipulation.)

Politicians and top management at the organisations responsible for our public transport swan around in VIP cars with police escorts, insulated from the impacts of delayed and overcrowded trains.  These guys need to use public transport frequently - not just for media attention.  Got a meeting in KL?  Use the LRT.  Meeting at the airport?  Take the train.  One way or another the people involved need to have some skin in the game.  Only then will we achieve a culture which is constantly reinforcing good practices.

Information and contingency

Finally, there is the 'soft' side to all of this.   When services are affected, what is the Plan B, Plan C?  How is the system designed to be resilient?  How is information communicated to those who need it, and what about inter-agency co-ordination and co-operation?

These kinds of questions should come up in the planning and design of our public transport, and they should be regularly reviewed and updated.  There needs to be an assessment of risks to the system.  That includes risks of theft of any part of the infrastructure. How is this controlled?  Maybe the assets need to be protected.  Perhaps security needs to be enhanced.  

When services are disrupted, there are back up options.  This is something KL has got a little better at - not just leaving commuters to fend for themselves and relying on extortionate Grab cars.  Generally the Plan B is buses.  But rather than holding a lot of contingency buses that get 'activated' when there's disruption, more emphasis should be placed on building resilience into the overall public transport system.  Build capacity, build parallel routes - give people the easy multiple choice of LRT, MRT, bus, or bike, with no wrong answer.

For the contingency plan and alternative options to be effective, people need to know about them.  People need to be kept informed.  A single simple and clear app would help.  There should be clear messages on the main social media channels (and the relevant information should be in the post, not via a link to another website).  And there is no substitute for signage at stations, with live passenger information updates on clear screens.  That is a must.