Chicken and Egg

View of the Packard’s Corner T stop as seen from my bedroom window (December 2005)

I don’t think that anybody will dispute the fact that our public transport system is terrible. The last time I used public transport in Malaysia was the few weeks when I first started working before my mother made me buy a car. During my student years at IIUM, and before that in school in Seremban and Mantin, I took the bus or the commuter train all the time. My favorite part was paying the RM1.70 bus fare from IIUM to downtown KL in one- and five-sen coins, to which the Intrakota bus driver would give me a death stare before asking me how much I money I dumped into the machine.

:D

In a way, our public transport problem is a chicken and egg situation. People do not want to take public transport because the service is terrible. However, the bus and rail companies cannot afford to invest to improve their services if they cannot make enough money from the low ridership. The trend of low ridership began as more people could afford to buy their own cars and motorcycles. Therefore, while publicly we all want a better public transport system, in private most of us happily drive and ride our own cars and motorcycles to actually care about public transport. Public transport is used by only a minority of the lowest-income Malaysians and, er, guest workers.

A colleague rides the bus to work everyday while many students drive a car or ride a motorcycle just to get from their hostel to class. She commented recently, the day after the Prime Minister announced the fuel price increase, of how empty the buses were. The quantum of the fuel price increase is supposedly so shockingly high that the economy will collapse and people’s heads will blow. All right, may be not so dramatic, but Economics 101 says that all else equal, when the costs of driving (or riding your motorcycle) increases people will switch to using public transport. If Malaysians are not swarming the nearest bus and train stops anytime soon, then perhaps the fuel price increase is not that high enough that we can still absorb the price increase and be merry.