Papers please
The Causeway VTL by land has shown us the need to invest in better cross border transportation. But how? Is it even possible?
But yet, we can say all we want, and there are worthwhile investments that can be made, but Singapore policymakers will not be able to do much. While it’s a new year and we have a not so new government in Putrajaya, it means long-ingrained Malaysian attitudes will need to be examined.
It seems fitting to revisit much of this one year after the termination of the HSR Project.
Fenced-off lanes
The arrangements for the VTL (Land) on our side are actually quite small and may not size well to further expansion, I have to admit. It may complicate the Johor Chief Minister’s dream of once again having 300k daily crossings of the Causeway under the VTL arrangements .While on the Johor end they could easily fence off parts of Larkin terminal for the VTL buses to stop at and for on-arrival public health formalities to be completed, that’s not the case here.
Meanwhile at Queen Street, they put a tent in the car park. Granted, VTL (Land) travellers already live and work here so they’re used to this sort of thing, but the lack of dedicated facilities is still a bad look even if it’s meant to be temporary until the border can be fully reopened for testing-free general travel. The lack of better facilities may pose an obstacle towards expanding the VTL in the short term, too. We might probably have been even worse off had they torn down the Woodlands Temporary Bus Interchange.
On the other hand, there’s Gali Batu bus terminal, which is not being used for daily transportation of local passengers and can thus support the VTL (Land) on a larger scale than a tent in a car park. It may be safer, too, much like how Changi’s arrival halls were closed to the public for the longest time. But it still suffers from poor local transport connections — though, again, easily fixed with allowing 75 and 184 to board from the terminal or a temporary bus stop outside.
In the medium term before the completion of the RTS in late 2026, there are still lessons we can learn from the VTL experience when it comes to managing public transport flows across the border in general, such as bus service isolated from the respective national bus networks. Causeway Link already did this with all CW1/2/5 buses terminating at the CIQ and operating a separate bus for Larkin-bound passengers, and locally we had 170X just between Kranji MRT and the Malaysian checkpoint.
Forcing a transfer is not an issue since passengers already alight for customs clearance; and with a well-developed pedestrian exit to JB Sentral, there is little concern about packing everyone back on the same bus, since a significant enough group of people will be exiting to JB Sentral for better local connections there. On the Woodlands end, maybe a better bus stop for connections to the MRT system can be catered for as part of the Woodlands Checkpoint expansion.
The best option for such a closed-loop bus system would involve reclaiming the KTM tracks ahead of schedule, but that just raises the question on why don’t we just improve the KTM operations instead. Or just leave it in mixed traffic and try to get by until 2027, but that fixes almost nothing.
The jump across
The real question surrounding any forecasts for the RTS or any RTS-lite service is not form, but accessibility. The RTS could be a boom or it could be a bust, and that really depends on what traffic policies are drafted to encourage use of public transport across the border.
In the first place, is the RTS capacity enough? I’d say yes. We’d also need to examine the real amount of passengers in a single direction. ICA’s records show they handle 108.7 million arrivals in a year, which averages out to about 300k passengers a day across all border checkpoints. No breakdown is provided, but after accounting for day-of-week fluctuations and passengers arriving by other checkpoints, I’m personally inclined to think that the real Causeway demand in a single direction is around half the 400k number quoted.
Thus, it is possible that the checkpoint already handles slightly over 10k per hour per direction by itself in peak periods. So if the crowd was evenly distributed between the RTS and the existing checkpoint (since there will still be people who have to drive into Singapore), we’re talking 6k-7k passengers per hour per direction of demand.
How do we fill it? Sure, there’s the BRT and the current KTM Komuter service. The former may well work far better in Johor considering the availability and cost of manpower there compared to across the border. But the fact of the matter is that at the operational parameters of the BRT system just don’t make the cut. According to their website, they plan to operate 18m bendy buses at 10 to 15 minute frequencies. Forget the people movers, this is actually worse than feeder bus services in Singapore at maybe just over a thousand passengers per hour per direction. It gets better with 25m double-articulated buses, but not by a lot, and while there are other possible ways to improve, as it stands it’s not a good look.
The second option is park and ride, but park and ride just feeds existing social biases and does not really statistically matter in projections — unless you were to take away choice such as by jacking up the Vehicle Entry Permit fees for personal vehicles massively. Across the entire SBK Line in the Klang Valley, there are ten thousand motorbike and car parking lots combined across 14 park and ride facilities. At the RTS maybe only one can be built — if we’re lucky, a second near the RTS depot — so realistically you might get only two thousand parking lots a day, which is a drop in the ocean.
You could, however, do both — build park and ride facilities at KTM stations and major BRT stops, then have people take public transport to the Bukit Chagar RTS terminal. If a similar amount of parking facilities to the SBK Line can be offered across all these sites, then it makes some more sense — but 20k passengers a day (10k in each direction) is still a far cry compared to the expected passenger load of the RTS. They could build even more, but I remain skeptical.
And with these two options we would have filled up less than half of the RTS’ rated capacity. Perhaps we might have done nothing about the Causeway congestion, too, with the RTS only adding new riders who now find it slightly less painful to get a job in Singapore while staying in Johor.
The other way
Remember when I said that it might be a good idea to build an express bus terminal somewhere between Tuas Checkpoint and Tuas Link station? I think I’ve found more reasons, though they each have varying degrees of shakiness.
In the absence of HSR it remains to be seen to what extent the Johor state government will press on with its plans for the Iskandar special area. Current headlines are not optimistic, with Forest City, possibly the largest development in the area, getting bad press after bad press. Still, on the Tuas side, there are already several developments served by Causeway Link buses. While one might not get very far looking at the paucity of development in the area, an expansion of bus service in the area might be reasonable. This of course assumes that the existing Iskandar Malaysia projects do fill up sufficiently to generate enough cross-border traffic to Singapore.
And that may also include former areas that may have found it more convenient to make their way to the Causeway. If CW4 can and did go out all the way to Pontian, it might be a reasonable ask for someone to operate such expansive service out of the Second Link, apart from the true intercity coaches to Melaka, KL, and points north. But it very likely won’t be with typical public buses — since this is a model similar to the regional GO Transit system in Ontario, Canada, more coach-like vehicles with increased seating (maybe even double deckers?) should be used.
As mentioned, should uncertainty remain over the HSR project, an intercity bus terminal also handling such regional traffic would still be a reasonable ask. KTM upgrades will not do anything about travel to most of the major towns south of KL, since the alignment is inland. And to the north, it may not be sufficiently time-competitive enough depending on the ETS stopping patterns. And should the HSR somehow happen, the terminal can continue to operate on regional traffic.
This is something we have to accept — perhaps apart from existing KTM lines and planned BRT corridors (which if the Los Angeles and Taichung experiences show, should probably be a tram system instead) — rail service is not that realistic in Johor due to the low density American Dream neighbourhoods. The question now is, who is imaginative enough to run such a bus network? Handal Indah? The Johor state government? Prasarana? Or heaven forbid, Strides (formerly SMRT)?
Then again I guess this is wishful thinking looking at the state of public transport in the Klang Valley.
Try, try again
It was quite fitting that as I had this sitting in my drafts folder, 9th Malaysian PM Ismail Sabri dropped by and said his government was interested in resurrecting the KL-Singapore HSR project. Assuming it sticks and the 10th PM doesn’t scrap it again, that changes a lot of the calculus — albeit back to some rather familiar pre-Pakatan math. Of course, it has to be said that there is still a significant amount of political football being played up in the Klang Valley.
Apart from the inevitability of the project being resurrected as a crony handout exercise, as Mahathir and his austerity gang allege, the question of local accessibility to the HSR stations still remain. In a similar vein to the issues faced on the Causeway, poor public transport access and a reliance on cars means people can easily eschew the HSR and use the relatively better-developed expressway network instead.
With Singapore involved and the political goal of 90 minutes travel time between Jurong and Bandar Malaysia, the poor accessibility of the HSR stations can be deemed to be a necessary evil. Should HSR 3.0 find a way to shift the enroute stations so they can be closer to the towns they’re meant to serve, all the better. Though I think it unlikely to happen.
But with Singapore involved, the insistence on an AssetCo also still remains. Apart from the crony handouts and the corruption potentially involved in the absence of an AssetCo, valid concerns remain such as the legal mechanism for HSR extensions to Penang and potentially to Thailand. This is a question that needs answers. Under the original HSR plan, the AssetCo was to own all required assets to operate the railways and lease them out to the train operators, much like how contracting in Singapore is structured. The operators just lease the trains.
It is easy enough to see how this gets messy should the Malaysian government somehow manage to get shovels in the ground for a HSR line to Ipoh, Penang, and perhaps the Thai border. Part of their fleet would be controlled by the KL-Singapore HSR AssetCo and there’s also a perceived risk that the AssetCo arrangement would be extended all the way to Padang Besar. That ties the hands of a lot of people. Things like the domestic service using different trains from the international service (like with denser seating, for example) cannot happen if the AssetCo only brings in one type of fleet.
Perhaps it may be more acceptable to Malaysia to convert the AssetCo to an Infrastructure Manager, with trains taken out of the AssetCo contract. Each train operator can then buy their own trains, configured according to their unique needs, subject to the conditions specified. This is what happens in Europe. So while any extension to Penang or Padang Besar would still have to conceptually follow the same business model and adopt similar rail systems, the Infrastructure Manager for the northern section could be a 100% Malaysian company. At Padang Besar, maybe the Thais can do something similar if they want to enable through trains to Bangkok.
An open architecture might even allow for sleeper HSR trains to Bangkok from Singapore or something. That’s if it does happen, but I wouldn’t keep my hopes up so long as people continue to believe a 3–4 hour KTM ride is competitive with air travel.
