Rosli Khan
Kuala Lumpur remains one of the few major cities in the region without a proper inner-city bus terminal.
Before Terminal Bas Selatan (TBS) appeared on the scene in 2011, we had Puduraya – messy, cramped and chaotic at times, but central, functional and located exactly where passengers needed it.
Instead of improving and modernising Puduraya, Kuala Lumpur City Hall chose the opposite approach.
Worried about buses ‘cluttering’ the city centre, it began dispersing services to KL’s periphery: Jalan Pekeliling, Jalan Duta, Hentian Putra and even out of town in remote Gombak.
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Then came a series of promises: better planning and integration, and new terminals at Plaza Rakyat, TBS and, eventually, KL Sentral.
None of those materialised as intended.
TBS has been an expensive but poorly located terminal on the city’s southern fringe, while the Plaza Rakyat structure has been left abandoned for 30 years, leaving an embarrassing void in the heart of the city.
Mayor’s first task
The new mayor’s first task should be to examine how City Hall has allowed the Puduraya-Plaza Rakyat fiasco to drag on for three decades, and bring closure to the long-running and bizarre planning failure.
Inner-city KL still urgently needs an inter-urban bus or coach terminal, much like London’s Victoria Coach Station or Busta Shinjuku, Tokyo’s express bus terminal.
Without a city-centre bus terminal, City Hall cannot claim that public transport has been given due priority.
The absence of such a facility symbolises deeper dysfunction within City Hall’s governance and its flawed approach to public transport planning.
Our obsession with highways
KL is also known, infamously, as the city of flyovers and elevated highways.
The addiction of successive administrations to highways has resulted in a city littered with elevated structures, spaghetti junctions and monolithic concrete pillars.
Examples abound: the double-deck highway running parallel to the old Sungai Besi airport is one of many; the Wangsa Maju spaghetti junction is another, while the Jalan Tun Razak–Kampung Pandan interchange is a motorist’s nightmare.
Yet, congestion has only worsened.
Private car trips now outnumber public transport trips by a 7:1 ratio. That means, barely 14% of daily trips are made on public transport, with the remaining 86% relying on private vehicles.
This over dependence on highways has pushed KL into daily gridlock and consumed vast amounts of urban space for elevated structures and parking lots.
Developers are forced by local authorities to build multi-storey and underground parking garages, diverting resources away from productive use.
Billions in economic value have been lost, and KL still lacks a functional replacement for the old Puduraya.
It is a staggering failure and a reflection of City Hall’s mismanagement – one the new mayor must tackle with seriousness, transparency and accountability.
A vision that never matched reality
On paper, KL’s transport plan resembles a modern, world-class system: driverless light rail transit and mass rapid transit lines, a functioning monorail, and so-called integrated terminals.
The reality, however, is a patchwork of half-fulfilled promises, where highways dominate the traffic movements and public transport remains second-class infrastructure.
City Hall’s history of terminals tells the story clearly:
- Jalan Pekeliling – closed, shifted to Gombak
- Hentian Putra – closed and demolished
- Hentian Duta – underutilised
- Plaza Rakyat – abandoned for three decades
- TBS – modern but mislocated and poorly connected to the city’s core
KL Sentral, meanwhile, has evolved into a property-driven development masquerading as a transport hub, with commercial interests overshadowing its original mobility function.
And while KL boasts world-class underground stations at TRX and KLCC as popular mass rapid transit stations, both lack the necessary first-and-last-mile links for other modes of travel, including express buses.
These two locations could be redesigned to accommodate central inter-urban coach stations performing the same functions as Victoria or Shinjuku.
What’s missing is a coherent mobility masterplan, one that prioritises connectivity, proper pavements and walkways, pedestrian-friendly streets, complementary bus terminals, and a proper bus rapid transit (BRT) system.
Without it, KL remains a city where buildings are political showcases rather than components of an integrated transport ecosystem.
If the new mayor is serious about restoring Kuala Lumpur’s liveability and reversing decades of planning failures, he must implement two urgent and unavoidable policy shifts.
First, he must introduce a congestion charge for central KL. Like London, Singapore, Stockholm and New York, KL’s new mayor must be bold and begin reducing the volume of private vehicles entering the city core.
A congestion charge – targeted, data-driven and properly enforced – will:
- push commuters towards public transport
- free up road space
- reduce congestion and pollution
- generate revenue for buses, walkability and last-mile corridors.
Without demand management, no amount of rail investment, mass rapid transit expansion or railway double-tracking, will solve KL’s gridlock.
Second, the mayor must declare a strict “no new highways” policy. KL must stop building itself deeper into car dependency.
A clear policy is needed:
- No new elevated highways
- No new flyovers
- No more road expansions that induce further demand
Instead, City Hall should redirect resources toward pedestrianised streets, a proper BRT system with city bus routes, shaded walkways, and the long-ignored fundamentals of urban liveability.
Only then can KL begin shifting from a car-first city to a people-centred one and reclaim the soul it has been losing for more than three decades. – Free Malaysia Today
Rosli Khan, a traffic planning consultant, has a masters in transport planning and a PhD in transport economics from Cranfield University in England.
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