Getting around in KL

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To get anywhere in KL, you have to have a car. Simple as that. Somehow, when the expansion of city was being planned sometime after independence, whoever was responsible had not heard of the concept of public transport, but they were certainly familiar with the car. So they decided to build roads; lots of roads. In fact looking at the way that the city has been put together, it suddenly dawned on me that the planners must have been avid Sim City fans. The rest of this description will probably only be meaningful to Adam and a select handful of other ex-Sim City players.

So the first thing to do if you want to expand your city is to provide a road network so that people can travel into the centre form outlying residential areas. The path of least resistance is for the roads to follow the natural lay of the land, so in the Klang valley, this means twisting and turning every which way to get from A to B. Then someone thinks that it would be a good idea to have a new road from C to D, but this means crossing and interconnecting with the road from A to B. The result is a complete rat’s nest of twisty roads with no apparent logical layout, and a vast series of spaghetti junctions. The whole countryside ends up being covered in a mass of concrete. Granted the roads are of reasonably good quality, with three or more lanes and well surfaced. Not up to the best European standards, but certainly well ahead of 3^rd world countries like the USA.

With a city designed for the car, obviously everyone is going to want to drive everywhere, so a car becomes a must have possession. Yes there are buses but not very many routes or good frequency. There are also a couple of suburban train lines, but they serve only a tiny fraction of the residential areas. There’s also the token monorail in the city centre, but that looks more like something out of a Disney theme park.

Once you have the road network in place, people naturally want to move to desirable locations on the outskirts of the city, so developers build loads of high rise residential units to meeting this demand, and massive new shopping malls to service the new residents. As the units fill up, this generates more road traffic, so very soon you end up with congested roads everywhere.

Luckily I do not need to travel much other than to and from the airport and the weekly hash trip, but the car based culture still counts as a big minus point when comparing living in KL with London.