City buses add to commuters’ woes instead of easing road congestion

By Fauzan Mydin

For a small capital of about half a million people, Kota Kinabalu has a relatively high car ownership. There is a car for almost every three persons. Millions of people go to the city every year. By next year, there would be six million of them. After four months, city hall’s efforts to ease traffic jams by banning stage and mini buses from the central business district have not worked.

On June 1, the federal Commercial Vehicle Licensing Board (CVLB) gave a monopoly to Mustika Enterprise Sendirian Berhad to run six city buses that take commuters into the city centre. Stage and mini buses drop their passengers off at the Wawasan bus terminal where they take one of the city buses into town.

That has sparked complaints from angry commuters. They grumble that they have to spend more on bus fares and bear the inconvenience of longer travelling time and lost connections. Once in the city, they are caught in traffic jams during peak hours.

“We’re paying more for more trouble,” says Aishah Abdullah, a student who lives in Sepanggar, about 20 kilometres from Kota Kinabalu city. “The one ringgit extra a day to pay for city bus fares is a burden to my family. We are also wasting time queuing up to change buses.”

The buses are over-crowded during peak hours. They are neither cheap nor efficient and the air-conditioning does not work well under the sweltering heat of Kota Kinabalu. They do not keep to their schedules at 15-minute intervals. The elderly, women with babies in arms, very young children and the handicapped are shoved aside as passengers scramble for seats.

It is a far cry from what Liew Vui Keong, the federal deputy minister in the prime minister’s department, has promised. The only consolation is that the bus operator has waived fares for the elderly, the handicapped and students. But some of them say bus conductors still demand fares from them.

Mustika and the CVLB have acknowledged the problems. But they have done little to solve them. The company says it now has 19 buses of 30-, 46- and 60-seater. But these are not enough to cope with the rush-hour. In one peak hour, they can only take about 3,400 passengers into the city centre.

Even Ariffin Samsudin, the CVLB director, says that he has been receiving more complaints about the city buses from tourists than the locals. But other than monitoring the situation, the CVLB seems helpless.

It would make sense for the CVLB to end Mustika’s monopoly and allow other operators to put more buses in the city to cope with the daily rush. But Mr Liew, who supervises CVLB, told Insight Sabah that no other bus operators had shown interest in operating the city bus services. – Insight Sabah