Excessive variety of bikes an neglected contributing issue to highway congestion in Malaysia – UPM VC

A lot ado was made final week about extraordinary site visitors jams within the run-up to Chinese language New 12 months and Ramadan, that are subsequent to one another this 12 months. Naturally, this gave rise to plenty of views and opinions on-line concerning the state of our transport infrastructure, whether or not public or personal.

Some regurgitated the outdated chestnut of the shortage of handy first- and last-mile options in our public transport whereas others introduced up Malaysia’s voracious urge for food for automobiles (a document 820,752 new automobiles had been registered within the nation final 12 months).

In line with transport minister Anthony Loke, his ministry is specializing in bettering public transport, and the federal government has no speedy plans to curb automobile possessionwhich, as many people know, is amongst Asia’s highest per capita.

So if nothing a lot goes to be (or could be) accomplished vis-à-vis automobiles, what about bikes? Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) vice-chancellor Datuk Prof Ir Dr Ahmad Farhan Mohamad Sadullah opines that the excessive variety of bikes within the nation is an neglected contributing issue to highway congestion, and that extra must be accomplished to encourage bikers to shift to public transport.

“We have to begin occupied with the push issue, how we need to shift folks from personal to public transport. The choice is already there, it’s simply how we need to be certain that the generalised value of journey will begin to make these in mid- and low-income teams really feel that they don’t have any alternative however to make use of public transport,” he instructed Astro Awani in a video interview.

“We’ve got a little bit of an issue in comparison with different international locations as a result of our personal transport additionally contains bikes, and we have now a giant variety of them, in addition they disrupt the highway capability and affect the extent of congestion. That’s the issue we have to perceive and that we have now to unravel.

“Now we discuss loads about automobile customers – too far (a step) – I really feel motorcyclists have to be shifted to public transport. However in fact the bike has a bonus in that it might peek (lane-split),” Ahmad Farhan added.

We’re positive you could have loads in your thoughts – share with us your ideas within the feedback. Maybe you could have an unheard-of resolution to our site visitors woes?