KIDEX: A HIGHWAY TOO FAR

Dr Kua Kia Soong, SUARAM Adviser

As the former MP for Petaling Jaya, I am glad that the people there have taken a stand against the Kidex highway and there is a campaign to put a stop to this highway building madness. The Menteri Besar of Selangor has disparaged the campaign as symptomatic of “Not in My Backyard” mentality while the PR wakil rakyat quibble about the traffic impact assessment.

What a pity that a PR-run state has not used the opportunity to show case Petaling Jaya as a model of city planning for BN to emulate but has instead, gone along with the highway building agenda of the developers and the car industry.

Petaling Jaya was built and planned as a residential satellite town to Kuala Lumpur. It could have been planned as a model vibrant city with excellent public transport system, boulevards, bike lanes, green public parks, museums, art galleries and other recreational spaces for its ample creative residents. Instead, through the years under the BN, its residential purpose was compromised by the building of factories and other monstrosities within its midst. Now, it is faced with the biggest defilement of its public space, namely, the Kidex Highway that will bisect PJ in two and further break up the communities there. The highway is a complete waste of space and environmentally unsustainable for a municipality like PJ.

Highways may be good to connect cities but in many well planned cities in the world, they are not designed to bring people into cities so much as to allow people to drive around them. This principle should also apply for highways to bypass towns in Malaysia.

The Kidex highway will bisect Petaling Jaya right down the middle and destroy the natural and people-friendly environment there. The land beside or under urban highways is often underdeveloped, thus spoiling the economy, safety and aesthetics. Noisy polluting cars will not help our agenda to lower carbon emissions and create a healthier and more pleasant environment for Petaling Jaya. The extensive highway concrete surface will also create stormwater runoff which will exacerbate the problem of flashfloods as well as raise the temperature of Petaling Jaya.

Do we want our cities to be like Paris, a city with no downtown highway obstructions, or Minneapolis, which has several highways? Some cities have begun removing highways from the downtowns of cities. Examples are Boston, San Francisco and New York where they have created boulevards where elevated highways once stood. Clearly, highways make it less pleasant to live downtown, at the very same time they make it easier to live farther away. It’s hard to create cohesive, connected communities when there are giant roads dividing neighborhoods.

For all the arguments about traffic impact of Kidex, evidence shows time and again that removing highways actually reduces the number of cars on the road. Traffic is one of the best-known examples of induced demand; the more highways there are, the more people will use them.