The Creepy, Yet Beautiful Street Art of Dan Witz Now in L.A.
Recession Obsession: Sky's Gourmet Tacos
Silver Lake Art Crawl: Also a Food Truck Crawl?
Does Traffic Get Worse After the End of Daylight Saving Time?
Eye Nosh: Is This the Best Pastrami in America?
Photos by: Kazuo Lim Khee Boon
Malaysia is a country of some 20 million people in Southeast Asia. In the last seven years, they have built an extensive monorail system around their capital, Kuala Lumpur.
The website of the KL Monorail sums up its attributes:
"The RM1.18 billion KL Monorail privatisation project is an inner-city public transit system that serves the central business, hotel and shopping district of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia .
The 8.6km long, dual guideway, straddle-beam elevated monorail system will begin from the Pekeliling Bus Terminal in the north, and pass through Kuala Lumpur 's 'Golden Triangle' before reaching KL Sentral in Brickfields.
Fully elevated with 11 stations, the KL Monorail is projected to carry some 85,000 passengers per day. The system uses 12 units of 2-car trains, each capable of handling up to 18,000 passengers per hour per direction if operating at 2 minutes headway between trains.
Work on the project was interrupted by the economic crisis in 1998. Construction resumed in July 1999 and works on stations and tracks are already completed.
KL Monorail has started operation on 31 August 2003 . "
Malaysia is smaller, poorer and far less financially well off than the 38 million residents of the State of California. But then again the Malays have money to spend because they aren't wasting 2 billion dollars a week fighting a useless and destructive war in Iraq.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
it looks beautiful, too bad that most Americans have to experience it as a Disney-provided fantasy in Tomorrowland
hmmm... last time i checked the federal gov't was responsible for the national defense and not the state of california (although we could be a nation state, and should).
now remind me, does malaysia have a 3rd world country that share a southern border and also insists on dumping it's poor and uneducated to their so accomidating neighbor to the north? and then leave their neighbor to the north fiscally responsible for those without the help of the federal government?
how you changed a public transportation post to another idiotic jab at foreign policy is beyond me, but give it up man.
Nyeah, you can't spell and you're calling the people who do the hardest jobs in the city uneducated. Why am I not surprised? Immigration (legal and otherwise) is an issue which affects the entire world, and it has nothing to do with "dumping" people here or there, and has to do with where the jobs are. In fact, Malaysia has many immigration related issues.
There's significally more to the story of the Malaysia monorail system that is written here. The first company went bust, and had to be bailed out by the government, at significant cost to the already strapped Malaysian tax-payers. Then there were many charges of cronyism, bribery and corruption, which is pretty standard in many places, but esp. in Malaysia. Yes, a monorail here would be nice, but LA committed to the more expensive underground system and the city isn't likely to reverse itself.
Malaysia also has a good sized oil indusry, with far fewer regulations than in the US, including off-shore drilling.
They also have a quite comprehensive subway@LRT network in KL. Anyway, I think they would prefer monorail system for public transportation (they're planning to build the same system in their north; Penang and south; JB cities), since the technology is theirs and that sure make the cost lower.
The monorail was selected for the rooute because KL wanted a rail system to pass the business district of Bukit Bintang and the Golden Triangle of KL, since the area is very dense, an elevated monorail system was deemed the best choice rather than the conventional rails. So it was not all about giving it to cronies and bribery, critical assessment was used.
The company that originally designed and suppose to construct the KL monorail was Hitaci, but the Asian Crisis drained KL of its money and the project was abandoned for 2 years until KL finally have funds and gave the project to high tech bus manufacturing company,MTrans.So far MTrans have not busted and they are receiving good ridership for its monorail(4 million passengers in 3 years). They have also been consulted by other Asian countries in implementing monorails in their respective cities such as South Korea and India.The monorail is also promoting Malaysian technology overseas.
The only con of the KL monorail is that it does not have emergency walkways along the monorail tracks,although the monorails could be towed by another monorail should one malfunction.
Meanwhile,Penang Island,Malaysia have received funds for its own monorail system while Johor Bharu will build a monorail network in the future through the state government initiative rather than wait for funds from the federal government.
More pics of KL monorail in monorail.com
http://www.monorails.org/tMspages/KLspecial01.html
Malaysia is bordered by a third world country to its north: Thailand.
If you think that there is no relationship between the relatively small amount of money devoted to public transportation in the US, and the overwhelmingly huge amount of dollars pouring into defense then you are quite deluded.
While American declines as a nation, morally, economically, educationally.....other countries around the globe pour tax dollars into schools, healthcare, housing, and public transportation.