Sustainable Development and Worldviews

If you pay peanuts, you get monkey. The same applies to public transport. An excellent transit system is not cheap.  However, public transport needs more than funds to achieve excellence. It requires good town planning.  Here lies the problem - public transport and town planning are often conceived and operated as separate department. Transport experts focus only on mobility while planners on buildings and landscape.  The result? Billions are pumped into public transport yet the usage of public transport remains dismal.  The purported 2018 net losses of Prasarana Malaysia Berhad, the country's main operator of public transport, was between RM3 billion to RM5 billion, with estimated impairment of RM30 billion.  With so many billions spent, how many trips were taken via public transport in Klang Valley? About 21% . At other places, the figure is way lower. In Penang, it's between 3% to 8% . To complicate matters further, the st...

(Photo: Penang Global Tourism Facebook Page ) George Town was the place for Chinese medicine and orh kueh (yam cake) when I was young. Both shops are not there anymore. Today, they serve latte and cempedak cheese cake. This year's July 7 marked the twelfth year of George Town's inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There has been a contest over the interpretation of the inscription, couched in phrases from the humanities. When new businesses replace under-performing ones, it's labelled " Disneyfication ". When properties receive new tenants, it's scorned as " gentrification ".  When heritage buildings are being refurbished, it's castigated as " Unesco-cide ".  Marco D'Eramo epitomises this school of thoughts. "UNESCO’s ‘World Heritage’ listing," he writes , "is the kiss of death. Once the label is affixed, the city’s life is snuffed out; it is ready for taxidermy." Taking a step bac...

The decision over the High Speed Rail (HSR) project linking Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, Negeri Sembilan, Melaka, and Johor to Singapore has been deferred to the end of the year. This will be the last extension for Malaysia and Singapore to finalise technicalities before the project's launch.[1] HSR system is not only a faster and more convenient mode of medium and long-distance travel but a catalyst for urban development and trade growth, as seen in several countries. The construction of the South Europe Atlantic HSR that began in 2012 and completed in 2017 has created 14,000 jobs, generated €1.6 billion (RM7.6 billion) in production, with added value of €755 million (RM3.6 billion) in the three regions.[2] After the installation of the HSR line that connects Cologne and Frankfurt since 2001, the GDP of the region had increased 8.5% faster than if the infrastructure had not been built. Provinces in China with HSR have observed 25% more revenues than provinces without HSR.[3] Due to ...