Sepang gridlock reflects Malaysia’s wider transport problem

From Boo Jia Cher

The chaos at Sepang International Circuit during the Formula 1 weekend was frustrating, but hardly surprising.

Thousands of fans were left stranded. Crowds spilled onto the highway, with some fans walking along emergency lanes towards Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Shuttle buses struggled to cope with the sudden surge, while traffic around the circuit ground to a standstill.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a one-off failure of event management. But for anyone who uses Malaysian public transport every day, the problems at Sepang should look very familiar.

Sepang was simply a much bigger, more visible version of the transport problems we already face in our cities.

We still don't take buses seriously

At the heart of the problem is a basic mistake in how we design our roads: buses are still treated as a mode of transport that has to squeeze into traffic, rather than being given priority.

Whenever a major event is expected to attract large crowds, the usual solution is simple: add more buses.

However, putting more buses onto the same congested roads does not solve much. A bus is only useful if it can actually move. A 12-metre bus carrying 50 or 60 people has little advantage over dozens of cars if it is stuck in the same traffic.

That is what happened at Sepang. Once the roads around the circuit became jammed, the shuttle buses could not bypass the congestion. They became part of it.

If a bus that normally takes 20 minutes to complete a trip takes two hours instead, the number of passengers it can carry over the course of the day collapses. Adding more buses only helps if there is enough road capacity for them to move.

This is the same problem commuters face every morning on roads such as Jalan Ampang and the Federal Highway. You can see buses sitting in the same three-lane traffic jam as everyone else while carrying dozens of passengers who chose public transport to avoid sitting in traffic.

A bus carrying 50 people should not have to compete for road space with 50 separate cars. If we want buses to work, they need dedicated, physically protected bus lanes that cannot simply become another lane for cars whenever traffic gets bad.

Grab is not mass transit

Another problem is the tendency to lump taxis and e-hailing services such as Grab into the same category as public transport. They are useful, of course. But they are not a substitute for mass transit.

A Grab car still occupies roughly the same road space as any other car. And when tens of thousands of people leave an event at roughly the same time, asking each person to book an individual car creates an enormous amount of traffic.

Cars have to queue to pick people up, stop at roadsides, make U-turns and squeeze through already crowded roads.

One bus can carry dozens of people in a single vehicle. To move the same number of passengers using individual cars requires a long line of vehicles. That difference matters enormously when road space is limited.

Instead of using e-hailing as a substitute for public transport, planners should treat it as a feeder service that helps people get to rail stations and bus hubs, rather than something that replaces high-capacity transport altogether. Otherwise, we end up filling our roads with hundreds of low-capacity vehicles precisely when we need to move the most people.

The problem doesn't stop at Sepang

There is another problem that is easier to miss. Where do all those extra buses and drivers come from?

In an already underserved public transport system, buses and drivers have to be pulled from regular routes to serve major events. That means someone elsewhere can end up waiting longer for a bus simply because another part of the country is hosting a major event.

This is a sign of how little spare capacity our bus networks have. A healthy public transport system should have enough buses and drivers to handle a major event without effectively robbing one to pay another.

A weekend transport surge can put pressure on ordinary commuters in surrounding neighbourhoods. People who had nothing to do with the event can end up paying for it through longer waiting times.

Johor Bahru should take note

Sepang should also be a warning for Johor Bahru. The upcoming RTS Link will bring large numbers of passengers directly into Bukit Chagar and central Johor Bahru. The rail connection itself is a major and potentially transformative investment.

However, trains do not exist in isolation. What happens after passengers leave the station matters just as much.

If thousands of commuters step out from the Bukit Chagar station and find themselves surrounded by cars, taxis and e-hailing vehicles fighting for space on already congested roads, we could end up recreating the same problem as Sepang, but every day.

Johor Bahru also has a basic problem with walkability. Walking between Bukit Chagar and nearby parts of the city can still mean dealing with broken pavements, a lack of shade, missing crossings and wide, intimidating roads.

A person should not need a car just to cross the street or walk a few hundred metres from a train station. If walking is unpleasant and buses are stuck in traffic, many people will simply choose to drive or book a Grab instead. That adds even more cars to the streets around the station.

The RTS can bring huge numbers of people into the city, but the city still needs to give those people somewhere to go. That means proper pedestrian connections, safe crossings, shaded walkways and dedicated bus lanes should be treated as part of the RTS investment, not as optional improvements to be dealt with later.

We cannot traffic-manage our way out of this

The response to the Sepang chaos focused heavily on traffic police, lane diversions and managing the flow of vehicles. Those things have their place, but they cannot solve a more fundamental problem: too many people are being asked to use the same limited road space at the same time.

We need to start designing our roads around how many people they can move, rather than how many cars they can accommodate. That means giving buses and other high-capacity vehicles priority on dedicated lanes.

It means managing e-hailing pick-up points so they do not clog the entrances to major transport hubs. Major events should also have enough dedicated transport capacity without stripping ordinary neighbourhood bus routes, while walking and cycling should be made a realistic part of the journey, especially around major train stations.

For one weekend, Sepang gave us an unusually clear view of a problem that normally plays out more quietly across Malaysian cities: we built our roads around cars, then expected public transport to somehow work within them.

The lesson from Sepang will keep repeating itself on our highways, outside our train stations, and on the daily commute home, as long as we don't fundamentally change our transport planning.

Boo Jia Cher is an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.