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.