Upgrading road infrastructure has proven to be a futile effort 

THE irony of going for a driving holiday in Malaysia is that the vacation you meant to take during holidays could end up being the thing that would actually stress you out. 

And toll-free-for-the-holidays policy, introduced not many years ago to the gleeful herds of Malaysian drivers, has definitely made it worse. 

Peninsular Malaysia has a network of 177,569km of trunk roads and highways, while there are more than 36 million registered vehicles in the country, averaging at 202 vehicles per km. Imagine if every vehicle plies the roads at the same time, we won’t even be able to squeeze lemons between vehicles. 

One could vividly recall a horrendous balik kampung experience about 20 years ago — a 450km, 15-hour one-way journey by a family of two adults and three children in an A-segment car — which has made one sworn never to take that particular North-South highway again. 

Upgrading road infrastructure has proven to be a futile effort. Experts has blamed road over-building for the ever-increasing car ownership numbers. A little over 15 years ago the Malaysian market barely broke the half-million vehicle sales benchmark. Last year, it breached the 800,000- unit barrier. 

The result? Road travel became a chore, especially in the Klang Valley, despite a spaghetti of highways zigzagging Selangor around the Federal Territory. A study in 2013 found that there were 3.2 million private cars in the Klang Valley, with an average growth of 30,000 every month. Using that number, even without its compounding effect, it should have doubled in 2022. 

A typical drive from Petaling Jaya to Cheras during rush hour takes 11⁄2 hours despite covering a mere 20km in distance. There are simply too many vehicles, even the decades-old ones to boot, plying our roads. 

Almost every day we can see ancient models of continental and oriental trucks and lorries on our roads. 

Just yesterday, one saw a short-bonnet Mercedes lorry — yes, the one with the wooden doors, mind you, which, according to Wikipedia, were last manufactured in the 1960s! — trudging along the Federal Highway shortly after rush hour. With dark smoke billowing out its exhaust pipes, it nonchalantly inched through traffic despite being at least six decades old. 

We seriously need to have a vehicle scrapping policy which, as proven in other countries, will help to lessen the pressure on our roads. 

Japan, for instance, has its famous End-of-Life Vehicle Act which regulates old vehicles within its borders. Nippon vehicles could be considered for scrapping as early as 10 or 15 years in the market. 

Heck, even India — the world’s most populous nation with an archaic economy and infrastructure — has introduced its Vehicle Scrappage Policy in April 2022, targeting the removal of old passenger and commercial vehicles over 20 years old and 15 years old respectively. 

We, on the other hand, have normalised our sight to half-a-century lorries delivering cargos to downtown Kuala Lumpur. 

• Asuki Abas is the editor of The Malaysian Reserve.

• This article first appeared in The Malaysian Reserve weekly print edition