The past few weeks have not been good for public transport in Malaysia. First was the embarrassing announcement from the CVLB that it had done everything it could and failed to rein in the taxi drivers.

This was followed by the embarrassing announcements from the director of the CVLB and the director of the Road Transport Department which stated that enforcement could not be a realistic solution.

They also managed to disagree about the source of the problem (both agree it is because of ‘attitude' but CVLB blames the passengers, while RTD blames the drivers).

And if that isn't bad enough, there was a horrible express bus crash in Rawang, where six lives were lost and many people were injured.

Those people who follow public transport in Malaysia can only hope that there is some light in this dark tunnel - and hope that new Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak may be providing that faint glimmer of hope.

In the recent cabinet line-up announcement, it became clear that there was no longer a Entrepreneur and Cooperatives Development Ministry (MECD). This ministry was the parent ministry for the CVLB and one wonders where the CVLB would go since it was now ‘homeless'.

CVLB Director Markiman Koriban believes that the CVLB will have a ‘father' by Friday - but would it be so easy to find a ‘father' for an undisciplined, lazy and ineffective government agency with no enforcement powers?

What government ministry would want to take responsibility for an ineffective CVLB?

The Transport Ministry has stated that they would like to provide a home for the CVLB - but perhaps this is just ministry politics - or a naive belief that they can ‘heal' the CVLB of its woes.

No amount of help or ‘healing' is going to save the CVLB. The director admitted that the agency could not do anything about taxi drivers and clearly cannot do anything to improve the express bus services either.

Public transport is very much a mess in general, with too many operators, unrealistically low fares and high overall costs.

The best solution that can be found is to dissolve the CVLB and create the Land Public Transport Commission (Spad) in its place.

Let the local and state authorities handle taxi service and forget about public transport as an ‘entrepreneurial' activity.

Najib must please bring forward the creation of Spad and introduce the Spad Bill soon as the next session of Parliament begins. Shahrir Samad would be the ideal member of Parliament to chair this commission.