Why the Causeway sucks
I was out on Thursday 6 April evening getting a well-deserved drink.
Thankfully I did so in Singapore, and didn’t try to get across the border. Because the border, as it usually does on the evening before a long weekend, was a mess. If I’m going to be honest, I do miss Bak Kut Teh in JB, but it’s increasing less and less worth it.
And jam on April 6th in particular was so bad that even bus services between Bukit Panjang and Woodlands/Yishun, which use the BKE to get out of the Bukit Panjang Road bus stops, got caught in the jam.
A screenshot sent to me of Google Maps traffic view even shows the jam extending all the way down to the KJE Woodlands Road exit at its worst. If all you wanted to do was to get from Choa Chu Kang to Sengkang, too bad.
If this post sounds familiar, it’s because this is going to be an expansion of a Twitter thread I made earlier this month.
Used to the horror
There are two main constituencies of cross-border travellers during periods like this.
300,000 Malaysians who commute across the border daily fall into the first group. I’ve ever been in Tuas where the traffic light turns green and an entire pack of Malaysia-registered motorcycles roared past me on their way to Tuas Checkpoint. And we can’t kid ourselves that we don’t need this group of workers, especially as they do the lower-paying grunt work jobs many Singaporeans don’t want to do.
The second group are those with deep roots in Malaysia. It’s not just the Malaysian work pass holders who rent rooms instead of commuting— PRs and naturalized Singaporeans, who likely already own their own property in Singapore, also fall into this category. Though more, especially those with the flexibility to choose to live in Malaysia, may increasingly shift back to the first group as the rental market begins to bite.
Most days the border already struggles to cope with just the first group, but on nice long weekends the second group is thrown in as well. Then of course there’s the third group — local born and bred Singaporeans going up for bak kut teh, RON97 petrol, and other cheap discounts. The end result is this; 1.4 million passing through the checkpoints across the Good Friday long weekend. That’s 20% the population of Singapore.
And we would be fools to assume this is only transitory. 7-hour jams may be the new normal. And in 7 hours, one can fly up to KL from Singapore Changi, and take a coach back down to Johor. It’s that long.
Down to the wire
This is just one isolated incident, but it could well get worse with other holidays. There are no good solutions, and ICA’s hands might be very well forced. Due to how endemic Malaysian car-brain is, the only thing that will work here are unilateral solutions imposed by fiat by the Singapore ICA, and the Malaysians told to huff copium or pressure their politicians for better public transport.
No, that doesn’t begin with just increasing the Causeway toll, even if that has to happen to begin with. The ICA can consider bringing back VTL-era measures such as pre-registration and appointment scheduling during such busy periods. Those who can’t get an appointment to cross the border by car would have to take the bus.
This can be done by requiring those entering by car to submit the SG Arrival Card — currently, they don’t have to. Under such a policy change, only those entering on foot/by public transport remain exempt. Exiting Singapore can also be controlled, maybe up to and including the submission of a current picture of the fuel gauge through the myICA app to enforce the three-quarter tank rule. The point is to make driving into Singapore a bureaucratic mess so everyone thinks twice.
Bus services can also be controlled by the Singapore LTA, simply by running more trips on Service 170X — every 2 to 3 minutes, on par with busy feeder bus services, works. There remains one minor flaw in the plan, in that buses entering Woodlands Checkpoint from Singapore do not have priority. At least this can be fixed, by drawing more lines. Perhaps making this a full day bus lane works too.
After all this happens I expect Malaysians working in Singapore to receive a grim reminder on why they chose to find employment in Singapore in the first place. These policies I propose, after all, are specifically designed to increase the use of public transport across the Causeway, at least where Singaporean authorities still have some form of control. Beyond that? Tough luck.
Marooned
Forcing cross-border travellers onto public transit can only mean one thing. The efficiently-run Singapore public transit system ends at the border — ie. JB Sentral/BSI CIQ, maybe Larkin on Service 170. And to be very clear and direct, I highly doubt Malaysian authorities will be able to rise up to the challenge here.
Doing something about this is going to be a drastic change from Anthony Loke on down. Think Drug Rehabilitation Centre, but for Malaysian car-brains. Yes, the extreme imagery is intended. It seems this is what works in Malaysia — poor maintenance of trains in the Klang Valley has the public breathing down Minister Loke’s neck, perhaps a similar magnitude of political noise from cross-border commuters left without any other options would be necessary.
Such policies would mean a large portion of 300,000 Malaysian commuters are marooned at CIQ with little form of onward transportation. While there may be additional express coaches out of Larkin, those coaches aren’t very high capacity, and ex-Singapore express coaches are likely to be hard to find and are going to be stuck in the congestion anyway. To make matters worse, there are no rail-based alternatives that can be deemed even marginally acceptable.
Even whilst the Shuttle Tebrau is KTM Intercity’s most frequent service, there are only FOUR northbound connections out of JB Sentral— ES42, 44, 46 and ERT26. Worse still is what happens when you get to Gemas, seeing only two ETS trains a day. Of these, only ONE train — the ES42/EG9322 pair — allow for a convenient transfer. Southbound is slightly better, where both ETS trains let you connect to KTM Intercity within 2 hours (though barely within in the case of EG9425/ES41). This makes KTM practically a non-starter for those going home over the weekend.
Minister Loke can very well get KTMB to put something together with excess locomotives and Intercity carriages, similarly to how it is made a civic obligation of domestic airlines to add capacity to East Malaysia on key public holidays. With the east coast DMUs now in operation and freeing up vehicles, these could run as an express between JB Sentral and Seremban, Kajang, or maybe TBS where access to KL transit for onward connections is possible.
KTMB discontinued the Ekspres Rakyat and other long distance trains in 2016, but before that we had diesel trains running under electric wires to KL and Butterworth. Sometimes I ask myself if it’s worth bringing back, at least as a seasonal special service, 8-car or even longer, just to get people to KL and outsource the road congestion from the Causeway and its environs. It’s not perfect, especially considering the performance of diesel trains compared to electric ones, but it will have to do.
When the Gemas-JB electrification and double tracking is complete, perhaps sometime in 2025 and the schedule keeps slipping, ETS services would also need to be significantly increased. Maybe they can do what is done in Europe occasionally as well, and couple those KTM Intercity carriages to ETS trains to provide additional capacity.
Cut off at the source
These questions must be answered, if not today, by 2027 when the RTS Link will open. At that time, it may be possible for Singapore authorities to significantly intensify the war on cars on the Causeway, but it means nothing without proper onward public transit connections. This is Malaysia, where anyone who’s anyone owns a car, so this is harder than first glance. Without solving this, expecting the RTS Link to be a silver bullet will not work, that I can promise you.
If both the Johor state government and the federal authorities in Putrajaya are serious about reducing congestion on the Causeway, they must address WHY people are driving across the border and what kind of public transport options can be provided so they don’t have to drive. Urban geography is part of it, but as the KVMRT shows, park and rides can be made to work. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the status quo.
The Johor state government, on its part, can just run more buses; it has the money to do so. Have them converge on Jalan Wong Ah Fook and Jalan Tun Abdul Razak tomorrow and shift them to IMBRT corridors progressively as parts of the BRT network is completed. This, and park and ride facilities, will not only help Malaysians. Good bus services also help bring in the Singapore dollar.
More buses and trains in Johor are definitely needed, but long weekends bring more Malaysians than Johoreans, and more buses and trains in Johor won’t go too far for them. The KTM line is also even more poorly suited for rail travel to the coastal southern towns and cities. In this case, the private investors being approached and approaching the government with interest to build the HSR may find a worthy cause of profit. If they’re not careful to fall into the pitfalls of HSR1.0, that is.
In the meantime, maybe, those investors could ask to build toilets on the Causeway and charge 3 ringgit per use. There’s a market for that, too.
Behind the times
Elsewhere on April 6, the Hong Kong Immigration Department handled around 293,000 departures at the land and sea crossing points with Mainland China and Macau. That’s 33% more than Singapore’s busiest day, and it’s not even Hong Kong’s busiest. On Monday April 10th, nearly half a million entered Hong Kong at the land and sea borders, more than double what the Singapore ICA processed.
Why were they so successful? The blunt answer is railways. Not directly autogates, but the fact that most don’t drive and cross the border by rail, allowing autogates to be their most effective. At least half of those crossing the Hong Kong-Mainland China border did so at Lo Wu and Lok Ma Chau MTR stations, or the high-speed rail out of West Kowloon station.
By these standards, the Singapore-Malaysia border seems decidedly third-world. Yes, unlike the HK-PRC border, this is a border between two sovereign countries, and yes, there is only so much paperwork reduction that can be done because of this fact. But the fact that the Singapore ICA needs to keep blaming “tailback from Malaysia” as the cause of Singapore jams, and causeway cams show lines of cars upon cars, is deeply shameful on the Malaysian end. And of course, once the jams start impacting Singaporeans getting around Singapore, the Singapore government has to take decisive action.
The key here is connecting traffic, as discussed above. At both MTR border stations, there are Shenzhen Metro connections allowing one to get to other railway stations in Shenzhen. And at Lo Wu, there are also a much larger range of regional departures from Shenzhen railway station located just across the border. Lastly of course, West Kowloon being part of the Chinese HSR network offers trains to many more parts of China then just Guangdong.
If you don’t want to count the Chinese SARs, let’s bring in another example. Heck, even San Ysidro on the US-Mexico border, apparently with just half the volumes of the Johor-Singapore Causeway alone, has the Tijuana BRT on one end and the San Diego Trolley on the other. The Tijuana BRT sucks, but some public transit is better than no transit — and let’s be honest, high chance the IMBRT goes the same way; Johor can learn from others’ mistakes.
Minister Loke, you know where to start. Maybe ask if the Singapore LTA and SBS Transit will sell to Johor our old Scania K230UB buses to kickstart the Stage Bus Service Transformation program. Then run more buses in Johor to JB Sentral.
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