JJ Ray's article on public transport woes throughout the country and the government's clueless but expensive response to throw more money to resolve them - but almost exclusively in Kuala Lumpur - is so very true.

Having said that, let's look at how the money for public transport in KL is being used.

Almost nobody now gets rides into the city or major commercial centres from their homes as all buses do only local circuits. Most people work in the city. I don't think too many office workers want to change buses to get to work.

The system in Western countries and Singapore is for buses to do almost an 'express' service from suburbs to the city centre at peak hours and the local circuits thereafter. That way office workers get in on time and the shopping and local crowd is catered for later.

In Singapore, every bus passes the nearest LRT station so people can take the train to their destination with certainty of time for travel. Of course, we cannot hope for that here as the stations are located in forsaken parts of the city (think Dang Wangi, Titiwangsa stations) and hardly in the suburbs (think Cheras, Jln Ipoh and Subang)!

And the bus operator does not feel it needs to publicise its routes to the public.

And after more than a year of tinkering, Rapid KL has ordered new trains for the grossly overcrowded and breakdown-prone Kelana Jaya line! This for 2008. How many people you think will want to travel on that line given that you now already wait for at least three trains to pass before being able to enter one during peak hours (if it arrives).

And as for the woeful city taxi service, I challenge any JPA official to take 10 KL taxis at random with me to check if their meters are tampered with. Anyone will tell you the only way taxi drivers are surviving is by having dodgy meters. And my personal feeling is they fix the meters to run very shortly after flag down so that the flag down charge of RM2 is just a surcharge and not a fare.

All this used to be good to sell Protons but that reason is gone. Can we hope to improve now to control non-national car sales?