By Chan Quan Min
Public transport planners have to keep with the times. Instead of park and ride, a dated concept, we should be talking about better solutions to the last mile connectivity problem – getting people to transport hubs such as train stations without having to drive a car at all.
Let’s say you have the option to sleep in an extra 15 minutes everyday and pay (slightly) less for parking. But you have to switch to the train, or LRT in local parlance, for part of your daily commute. Sounds like a good trade off?
Some people may take up the offer. But this is assuming you have a car to begin with.
Would giving KL-ites the option to park and ride make a big difference in the whole scheme of things? Would it help reduce congestion on the roads?
Tiger, ever the sceptic, doesn’t think so. Park and ride won’t change a thing, even with millions spent. Some people will see benefits, yes, but it will only be small minority.
Park and ride is a concept that pretty much means what it says. You plonk large parking sheds next to transport hubs to entice motorists to give up the wheel for part of their commute to work.
Motorists get to leave home in the air-conditioned comfort of their car, drive up and park in a secure facility and take the train to work, avoiding chronic city centre traffic.
Sounds good doesn’t it? Just wait until you hear how much it will cost taxpayers.
One thing though, park and ride is sexy. You can sex it up with a launch ceremony. Yes for a parking lot – no joke. You can get a VIP to officiate the launch, invite photographers, pop confetti and all that jazz.
This is exactly what happened last Sunday when deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin made an appearance at a location unusual for a man of his standing: Ampang LRT station. The man is of course more accustomed to wet markets, making sure traders stick to price controls.
At the launch, the organisers were proud to boast that the new park and ride, or “park n ride” if you want to be juvenile, cost RM30 million, according to a Bernama report.
It’s a sum more than a couple of million too high because this glorified parking lot will almost never make back its money.
Look at it this way: At RM30 million for 1,140 parking lots, the cost to construct a single lot works out to RM26,300.
Parking charges are RM4 a day using a myrapid card. The park and ride facility is restricted to public transport users.
A few taps on Tiger’s trusty calculator and we get a payback period of a shocking 18 years for this misguided investment. And that’s assuming there are zero running costs.
Tiger is just waiting for Prasarana, the government agency that owns and operates Kuala Lumpur’s public transport infrastructure to tell him it’s not all about the money.
Fine, Tiger is aware that Prasarana operates 90% of its bus routes at a loss. These “social routes” include feeder bus routes that connect communities to the higher capacity rail network.
Lets play a little game where Tiger gets to have all the fun and pretends he’s the managing director of Prasarana, Shahril Mokhtar.
Now, if Tiger was Shahril, he would pick loss-making feeder bus routes over loss-making park and ride any day.
It’s simple, a park and ride facility costs RM30 million and adds only 1,400 public transport users a day to the network if we assume one passenger per car. Multiply that number by two if you like, makes little difference to this comparison anyway.
A feeder bus route on the other hand, can cost in the region of RM2 million a year to operate and bring in up to 5,000 passengers a day.
These are ballpark figures because the cost to run a feeder bus route and the traffic it generates can depend on so many factors. The numbers come from information gleaned from Prasarana’s financial reports. Prasarana itself was not able to provide the numbers at short notice (48 hours).
In any case, the park and ride concept is dated and proven to be ineffectual. Park and ride facilities were popular in North American cities at the turn of the century. But since then, the language of public transport planners has changed.
It’s all about last mile connectivity now and not the sort of limited reach expensive park and ride facilities provide. Remember that you have to first own a car to use park and ride. Ouch.
Feeder busses are just one way to improve last mile connectivity. There are other cheaper solutions such as making it easier for commuters to cycle to their nearest train station.
A solution in Southeast Asian megacities of Bangkok and Jakarta is the motorcycle taxi; a cheap, quick and dangerous way to travel short distances between a transport hub and your home or office.
Tiger is aware Prasarana isn’t in too good a shape financially. It’s close to breaking even but not quite there yet which is why it needs to spend wisely.
A parking lot bathed in confetti that adds just 1,140 commuters to the 437,000 people who use public transport during peak hours every day doesn’t quite qualify as spending wisely.
But that’s not to say park and ride doesn’t work. It can work in a semi-urban setting where density is too low to justify a feeder bus service. It can work if it can be built cheaply.
GRRRRR!!!
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