FEBRUARY 13 — Instead of a 50 per cent discount for private vehicles during festive holidays, how about this idea?
Don’t give the 50 per cent discount. Let vehicle owners pay their share.
What of the RM80 million the government need not pay toll concessionaires?
Pass the money to express buses, intercity trains and airlines. Subsidise mass transportation rather than private transportation as they do in the saner parts of the world.
People who own private vehicles do not need incentives to travel further during holidays.
It’s the abused visual, of how occupants of 10 cars can fill a bus therefore utilise less road space, which then leads to less traffic. Trite but true.
Bus people maximise road utilisation, and train and plane people withdraw people from jammed roads shenanigans.
Do the right thing.
Bring 21st century Malaysia to tried and tested methods of the 20th century, and win using extremely unoriginal approaches to resolve cross country logistics of a holiday period.
The money is always better spent on public transportation, whether on office workers commuting from Sungai Buloh to KLCC, or for vacationers from Sungai Buloh to Alor Setar. The bang for the buck is in mass transportation, there is scant rebuttal to the premise.
The extra funds can make buses safer, improve drivers’ welfare, clean up bus and train stations and enhance travellers’ personal security — waiting at 2am in a sketchy Titiwangsa terminal.
Additionally, it is consistent with the transport ministry’s championing public transportation as evidenced by the RM50 monthly RapidKL pass for trains, buses and monorail. Commute numbers have cranked up, traffic jams reduced marginally in the capital — amazing that Pakatan Harapan does not campaign on the success at all.
Leap forward with more initiatives, not cower in the dark and fail to bask in your mass transit sunshine of success.
False rights, fake benefits
I cringe when politicians say that the people still need festive toll discounts.
By what measure? Asking people if they want something free misleads. Couching a benefit as a right is intellectually unsound.
Rights are adopted to change or protect societies with noble intentions, associating it with toll discount cheapens the very notion.
For example, the United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/RES/64/292 in 2010 declared safe and clean drinking water and sanitation a human right. Much earlier in 1949, the Geneva Convention’s Article 15 states prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated. Malaysia’s Article 10 states the right to assemble.
To give water to drink because there is no life without water is an overdue right. Don’t punch disarmed soldiers in your detention camp seems to emphasise honour rather than meanness.
Those are cool rights, and governments look pretty cool upholding them.
But toll discounts?
Decent rights championed, decent lives realised
Festive travel is voluntary travel. There is no inherent right to it.
Rights are instituted to do better by people, not feed their misconceptions.
Misconceptions like holiday travel is a right and as such the government should subsidise it. It is not. There is hardly any logical support to fatten private vehicle owners’ wallets.
If ministers instead chuck money for instance to buy and install tens of thousands of public water dispensers maintained and cared for with taxpayer money to reduce heat stroke and cardiac arrest incidences, then bravo to them.
Also, they’d reduce plastic waste which clogs waterways and drains, inducing mild distractions like floods.
But my imaginary dispensers exist in an imaginary Malaysia where practical solutions to non-communicable diseases like diabetes, hypertension and kidney ailments dominate. Imaginary since I imagine ministers prefer flown-in bottled water from Tuscany and cannot comprehend the people’s thirst.
Full price, they’d think harder
Here’s another alternate reality.
Fewer people will buy cars if they are made aware they have to pay sticker price for all of it — looking at you subsidised fuel.
They’d countenance public transportation both for their daily commute and seasonal outstation travel because the price differential between public and private transportation is disproportionate.
Framed in the opposite fashion, the current subsidisation of private travel — toll discounts and subsidised fuel — disincentivises public transportation.
It’s not that much cheaper to take the bus, or private cars are not expensive enough to render buses incredibly attractive.
Toll discounts are older than Roman roads, not
The free toll during festive holidays is a relatively new addition.
If private citizens can pay tolls when our GDP per capita was just above US$6,000 in 2006, why would they refuse to pay full price for holiday travel when our GDP per capita today is above US$14,000 today?
Then why won’t the government stand up and state it. Present common sense. Answer, the government is not convinced common sense appeals to Malaysians.
It fears political opponents will utilise it as campaign material. It rather wastes resources than be accused of being mean-hearted.
However, the government may be missing the bigger picture.
Even with free tolls, a large number of Malaysians travel on public transportation due to cost.
Waiting two hours for the express bus which is behind schedule in a dilapidated bus terminal, only to board and pray the bus reaches its toilet stop in time as the private vehicles on the highways stack up traffic is not fun.
They take public transportation because they cannot afford private vehicle ownership or rental.
The factory worker and administrative assistant is on the bus or train because the alternative is too expensive.
There are two classes of people to procure votes from.
Recent governments yearn for the love of the M40 driving their cars on the interstate, and hope that less paid for toll leads to electoral support.
Perhaps, but the middle-income group — even if they are not middle class — earn enough to run vehicles and appreciate the discount.
Relative to the lower income group below them, they are likelier to have political affiliations or at least affections. They are less moved to shift votes based on seasonal discounts.
The B40 finds their income band bars them from automobile ownership. They are also likely younger and politically disconnected and quite inclined to disloyalty.
They likelier approve the investment into public transportation, commutes or cross state travel cheaper, safer, reliable and comfortable.
There are more votes to be won from them.
Exit from a dead end
Anyways, as I started, toll discounts do a disservice to Malaysians.
It confuses the present mantra to maximise public transportation.
It is also lazy policy-making. To keep it because enough people complain. There will always be enough people to complain, more so in a time of social media.
Government has to see beyond the self-interest of the insanely loud electronically.
It has to stay the course to up public transportation and look at private transportation with disdain.
It is a shame the government took courageous steps to initially announce a complete end to festive holiday toll exemption, and reverted quite quickly to a 50 per cent discount regiment.
They are wrong to think the people are half happy or only half unhappy. People will always find ways to want more for nothing.
They also do not want to talk about how to pay for these expenses. Government takes the initiative to lead.
Public transportation is one of the most boring things to govern, and hard to measure in short term, but persistent effort to make it resilient long term cements support.
Just ask our cousins in the south.
*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
