The Jakarta Post, Friday, 17 February 2006
The experiences of three major Asian cities indicate a mass rapid transit (MRT) system will not work effectively unless there is great political will to integrate the system on a level playing field with cars, buses and other rail projects.
“Powerful leadership is needed to plan, think through and execute the plan,” a World Bank transportation expert, Jitendra N. Bajpai, said at a discussion Wednesday, citing Lee Kuan Yew and Nikita Kruschev as the figures behind the success of the Singapore and Moscow metros, respectively.
Bajpai — part of a team studying urban rail concessions in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Manila for the World Bank — said many of the failures in implementing MRT systems in these three cities derived from failed complementary actions, or unrealistic targets.
“Some expected the MRT systems to solve congestion and to improve public transportation across the board, without the complementary policies that are now recognized as necessary. These expectations were unrealistic,” he said.
Transportation policies should provide a level playing field for all transportation modes through tax/subsidy and regulatory measures, otherwise MRT benefits suffer and government funding support is higher than it should be, Bajpai said, explaining that this happens when cars or buses are subsidized or when competition is not regulated.
People also need to access the MRT by other transportation modes, therefore a failure to set up seamless transfers contributed to the fact that the MRT systems in the three cities failed to get car owners to switch to the systems.
“If you had a car, would you leave your car and use the system, knowing that you needed to make so many transfers? You wouldn’t do it, unless the transfers were very well done,” Bajpai said.
So far, the most successful of the systems is Bangkok’s 23-kilometer BTS skytrain, operating since 2000, with a ridership of 15.2 passengers per kilometer in a city of 10 million, 53 percent of whom use public transportation.
Manila’s 11 million population brought in only 15.6 passengers per kilometer on its 24-km LRT III system, in a city where 72 percent of the population uses public transportation.
Other systems — Bangkok’s Blue Line subway (18 km) and Kuala Lumpur’s Star (25 km), Putra (24 km) and Monorail (11 km) — each attracted fewer than 10 passengers per kilometer.
While all of these systems began with private concessions — in the hope of avoiding the need for public funding — most projects did not achieve the financial returns forecast, and were taken over by the government, Bajpai said.
“Because an MRT system is expensive — you can’t just leave off once the project has started, meaning that the government needs to take over,” he said, citing the Star and Putra lines in Kuala Lumpur.
Learning from the experiences of the three cities, Jakarta should try to address its transportation problems in a way that it can most afford, and not rely solely on private concessions because a strong government role is still needed to make the system feasible, Bajpai said.
“What happens is that people are attracted to a certain system without looking at how it can solve the problem. The solution is brought forward first, without looking at the problem,” he said.
In every step of planning and execution, public consultation and transparency should be emphasized, and the government’s focus needs to be on creating a sustainable MRT system, rather than on implementing an infrastructure project.
For Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Manila, “it’s a tale of winners and losers, and in the end the winners are the users — but not the poor people because fares are high — and the losers are the government, bankers and investors”, Bajpai said.
