Write an article about How Penang’s highway obsession reveals the tragedy of Malaysian politics .Organize the content with appropriate headings and subheadings (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6), Retain any existing tags from
From Boo Jia Cher
On Mount Erskine Road, Penang, bulldozers are closing in on a home built in 1950.
Charles Lawrence Byrne, 89, has lived there for nearly three-quarters of a century. Soon, a six-lane highway will roar just two metres from his porch, a project defended by the state as a necessary step to “ease traffic”.
Never mind that traffic hasn’t improved despite decades of expanding roads. Never mind that the evidence is overwhelming: building more highways doesn’t reduce congestion. It induces more of it.
Still, Penang infrastructure committee chairman Zairil Khir Johari insisted that the project is “essential”. Another highway. Another underpass. Another multi-million-ringgit project that dodges the root problems: car-centric planning, unreliable public transport, and a total failure of political imagination.
Ignoring real solutions
The alternative isn’t some utopian fantasy — it’s practical, proven, and already successful in cities worldwide. Penang doesn’t have to wait for its long-delayed LRT to improve mobility. It can act now by redirecting the RM25 million funds, currently earmarked for misguided highway expansions, into fast, affordable, bus-based transit solutions:
- More buses, running more frequently and reliably.
- Decent wages and training for bus drivers.
- Dedicated bus lanes that bypass traffic jams.
- Express routes linking suburban neighbourhoods to job hubs.
- Covered, shaded, dignified bus stops with seats and real-time updates.
These are low-cost, high-impact interventions, especially for working-class Malaysians who can’t afford to own or maintain a car.
Singapore, often cited as the regional gold standard, didn’t build a world-class system on rail alone. Its bus network is vast, timely, and intricately planned. It’s an equal pillar of its transport system. Buses there aren’t a “poor man’s” option. They’re an efficient, integrated lifeline.
So why aren’t we investing in the same? Because in Malaysia, when public transport is pushed aside, so too is the public interest.
The myth of progress
This is more than a question of transport policy. It is a deeper ideological failure, one that reveals the hollowness at the heart of Malaysia’s so-called progressive politics.
Take DAP, which governs Penang and positions itself as multiracial and reformist, a vital stance in a country fractured by race and religion. But beyond identity, what vision does it offer?
One increasingly hard to distinguish from the status quo: gross domestic product growth at all costs, car infrastructure dressed up as development, and policy choices that mirror the Barisan Nasional era. The branding has changed but the logic has not.
Is it truly progress if race-based populism is simply replaced by car-based populism?
A system designed to fail us
In Penang, DAP’s transport strategy has fallen into a familiar trap: more roads, more traffic, more land surrendered in the name of “modernisation”. But if development is still measured in highway lanes and megaprojects, what exactly are we reforming?
The tragedy isn’t merely that such projects are approved; it is that the political system rewards those behind them.
As long as political parties can rely on ethnic and religious loyalties, voters are expected to overlook policies that quietly serve elite interests.
A shameless capitalist who plays the ethnic defender can still win support, even if he has no intention of improving life for ordinary Malaysians, regardless of race or religion.
This is the legacy of decades of racialised politics: a system so entrenched that we have stopped questioning the economic and infrastructural models that shape our daily lives.
Instead, public discourse is hijacked by manufactured fears of “the Other”; threats that distract, divide, and protect the status quo.
Highways enrich contractors, consultants, and politically connected developers. The rakyat? They inherit longer commutes, hotter cities, and yet another empty promise of progress.
Consider Silicon Island: a billion-ringgit artificial landmass sold as a sustainable, tech-forward utopia. In reality, it endangers coastal ecosystems and displaces fishing communities.
Or the Penang Transport Master Plan, with its multi-billion-ringgit Pan-Island Link 1 (PIL1), a project that prioritises private cars over public buses, highways over homes.
This isn’t progress. It is elite extraction, repackaged in the language of diversity and digital futures.
False promises of highway modernity
It is time we asked harder questions of our self-proclaimed reformers. If you are still building highways while ignoring the bus-riding rakyat, who exactly are you serving?
As Byrne stands in his shrinking garden, he is not just resisting concrete. He is resisting the dangerous belief that “modernity” can be measured in square feet of asphalt.
Meanwhile, carless Malaysians stand silently at bus stops along eight-lane roads, watching cars roar past in clouds of dust and exhaust. Their patience is being stretched thin by buses that come once an hour, if at all.
Until we demand something better — better planning, better mobility, better politics — we will continue down the same broken path, mistaking speed for progress, and highways for civilisation.
Boo Jia Cher is an FMT reader.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.
and integrate them seamlessly into the new content without adding new tags. Include conclusion section and FAQs section at the end. do not include the title. it must return only article i dont want any extra information or introductory text with article e.g: ” Here is rewritten article:” or “Here is the rewritten content:”