Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – We’ve been here for a few days with a group of Cebuano taxi operators as guests of Autogas Petronas to watch the Petronas Formula-1 Malaysian Grand Prix over the weekend.
Since the race is a sporting event, allow us to instead share with you some of our observations regarding traffic in this modern city.
Coming from the airport, which according to our driver is 60 kilometers (via the new road) to our hotel, the thing that immediately impressed us was how wide the highway was and how clean it was.
Yes, it’s a new road, but along it you can see a lot of green (well we arrived at night, but you can’t miss the trees that lined the highway). The streetlights also became a good topic for conversation among us Cebuanos, who can’t seem to stop talking about the cost of lampposts in Metro Cebu.
The first night wasn’t exactly the real Kuala Lumpur, so after going around the city the next day we realized that much of our first impressions were really true.
The roads in the city proper are well maintained and there are proper signs set up to aid motorists. Noteworthy is also the fact that there are no graffiti on the street signs unlike in our place.
The driver who met us at the airport told us much about how the taxicabs operate in this part of the world, but our experience with a taxi driver who took us back to the hotel from the downtown area somehow did not seem to fit what we were initially told.
The driver refused to use his meter (sounds like a Cebu experience) and he charged us a flat rate to take us to the hotel. If not for the heavy rain, we’d had said no, but then we really had no choice.
It was a good thing that after the initial miscommunication, the driver somehow lightened up and gave us tips how to get from one place to another without having to pay taxi drivers so much.
He taught us the monorail, which could take us to the places we want to “very cheap” according to the taxi driver.
Traffic in the city is not smooth though. On the plane from Manila, we came across a letter to the editor discussing about how motorists should be made to pay for contributing to the traffic congestion in the city.
With some of the roads closed due to events related to the Formula-1 Grand Prix, traffic was bad in certain areas, but there are huge electronic signs announcing road closures and their radio stations also air the announcements.
Maybe our traffic authorities can learn something from KL about how to inform the motorists through the media and how signs should be put up so they can be read.
We don’t have the funds for the electronic billboards announcing the road closures though, but at least the CITOM should make sure that the money paid for tarpaulin signs would be put to good use.
The biggest difference really is in the condition of the roads. We can only wish we can have the same in Cebu.
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Another thing we observed here is that the buses and their taxicabs use LPG for fuel.
Our companions from the Cebu transport sector know very well the advantages of using such fuel and we can also only wish the same to happen in Cebu and the rest of our country soon.
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