Sustainable Development and Worldviews

Do you know that Zurich, Singapore, and Stockholm are top sustainable cities in the world? They have traffic jam too, like Penang. To solve the traffic problem, these 3 cities develop better public transport and build new roads simultaneously. Zurich, Switzerland Zurich has buses, trams, boats, and trains as modes of public transport. RM804 mil allocated by their government in 2017 to expand the northern bypass. Last year, the Swiss parliament set aside RM7.4 bil for their “Fund for the Special Financing of Road Transport” for road expansion projects. Switzerland has 239 tunnels with combined length of 251 km. The Galgenbuck Tunnel and Belchen Tunnel are currently being built at the cost of RM934 mil and RM2.05 bil respectively. In the pipeline is a new RM8.2 bil tunnel for cars, located next to the current Gotthard road tunnel. Singapore Singapore’s public transport comprises MRT, LRT, monorail, extensive bus network, fleets of regulated taxi, electric-car ...

Providing more public transport together with more roads is a multidimensional approach to building a feasible infrastructure for public mobility. That is the philosophy underlying the Penang Transport Master Plan. Each country constructs public mobility infrastructure according to its context. Not a single country in the world has stopped using roads or stopped constructing new ones as part of its strategy to increase public mobility. In the case of Penang, the multidimensional and multimodal approach has been adopted. A recent article ' Going off-road for sustainability, equity, and health ' disparages the multidimensional approach. The authors expressed caution over the complementary approach taken to build the public mobility infrastructure in Penang, drawing from examples in the likes of Zurich, Singapore, and others to show that the multidimensional model does not work. Nothing can be further from the truth. Those cities are the finest examples of the multidimensi...