Innovation to develop excellent public transport

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 states in Malaysia have limited control over tax money and automobile trade policies, which means that they don't have much say over public transport infrastructure.

States have more control over land use. Therefore, one solution is to incorporate town planning back into public transport development and vice versa. 

When we do that, then solving transport issues is no longer only about buying more buses or building a Light Rail Transit (LRT). It's about developing a transit city.

A transit city optimises public transport and generates fund through land usage to finance the development, maintenance, and upgrading of the transit system.

This idea, broadly known as 'transit-oriented development' (TOD), may be something new to many and suspicious to the skeptics, but it is time-tested and proven successful in various cities that are different from each other. 

Take Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway (MTR) as an example. When MTR plan was unveiled with a price tag of HK$3.4 billion in the late 1960s, professor Sean Mackey from the University of Hong Kong publicly criticised the proposal for its hefty cost.

Through an innovative town planning method known as 'Rail + Property', the MTR Corporation has not only managed to pay off the construction cost of the initial MTR line but also recorded a total profit of HK$139.67 billion from 2009 to 2019, with 90% public transport usage.

Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) had the same problem. The SG$5.3 billion MRT proposal was criticised by a team of experts led by professor Kenneth Hansen from Harvard University.

The Singaporean government did not back down. They undertook a 'land value capture' exercise to finance the MRT. The total revenue generated during the MRT development period from 1982 to 1987 exceeded SG$12 billion, more than enough to cover the construction cost. Today, the MRT serves as the backbone of Singapore's public transport system with 67% usage.

Other cities such as Copenhagen employs innovative 'profit sharing' method to fund their transit system.  In all sales agreements, the property buyer is required to pay additional fee every year for sixty years, after a metro station is built within 50 meters from the property. Copenhagen's public transport usage is 60%.

Details of these case studies can be found in Penang Institute's recent publication 'Exploring a Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Framework for Penang’s Urban Growth.'

Penang is planning to build the Penang Transport Master Plan (PTMP) over the next several decades. This development can explore some of the TOD methods to finance the long-term transport plan.

Only the synergy from the best of transit development and town planning will save our public transport system from being a monkey business.