I have been traveling to work every day (less weekends) for the last 4 years in a KTBM commuter train. My journey is from Kajang station to Putra station and back. Being over 60 years old, I only pay half the original train fare, which I am thoroughly grateful to KTMB's management. One may ask, what is a 60 odd year old man still working at that late age? I have my reason for continuing to work at that age; simply, it is a crave and sheer joy to be among the younger people at my work place, and they keep me high and motivated.
The reason for me writing this open letter is to state my disappointment at the services of the commuter train, which has been deteriorating of late. It does not seem to improve, but gets worse everyday. And this despite the changes made to the train schedule lately.
Each time I get to the station, I hear the usual announcement of train delays. I hope the management realised that if there is a delay, the waiting passengers gets larger, and the train will be full like sardine. Despite my age, I am comparatively fit and strong to stand throughout my trip. But this is not so for women, children and people much older than me.
There was an occasion a fortnight ago, when a middle age lady virtually drop herself while standing in a crowded train. Bubbles appear out of her mouth, shivered and turned pale. I had to rush out to keep open the door of the train, while other passengers helped the lady out. Nobody knew what to do with her, and we just waited for her to recover on her own. Of course, the train had to be stopped, and this caused a larger crowd of passengers to keep shoving into the train, which has by now filled to its brim.
I would like to appeal to the KTMB's management to look at how to improve the train services, especially to cut the delays and to increase the trains during peak hours. What I expect to see is for the management to come down to the stations (especially at KL Sentral and Bandar Tasik Selatan) along the Seremban-KL route, during peak hours to see the maddening crowd waiting for the trains.
I have traveled in Europe and there are many more train lines, but the service is efficient, fast, comfortable and definitely, the crowds are unlike ours.
Have pity on your commuters, for the train is their only means of travel that is reasonably affordable.
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In the interest of car makers, car assemblers, car importers & car distributors; the rakyat is made to suffer the deliberate deterioration in the public transport system throughout the country.
This despite the hundred of millions and even billions that have spent by the current government towards providing a "world class" public transport system. What went wrong? Was the existing public transport infrastructure sacrificed so that the rakyat will be forced to buy private vehicles, markets that are controlled by GLCs and cronies? Where and how were those monies spent and what was the result? Why weren't those responsible for the failure made to answer for it?
I would like to quote the editor of torque in the editors column this month, 'The government should also take back all the privatised roads from the evil road concessionaires. Roads, both modern highways that link cities and internal roads are a social cost to any government. They should not be built so that some greedy crony can collect billions from the people but rather so that the economic benefit can be shared by all and make Malaysian business more competetive.'
Also for the management of LRT, please take steps to repair the ticketing machines at Wangsa Maju Station.A few months back all the machines were found to be inoperable resulting in along queue at the manual ticketing counters.
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