Petaling Jaya will change drastically if the draft local plan devised by the Petaling Jaya Municipal Council (MPPJ) were adopted. Old roads are to be widened and new ones created, all to accommodate additional traffic. Residential areas designated as low density is to be redesignated as medium or high density, by approving high-rise apartments, or by redesignating them as commercial areas.
Jalan Gasing will become a six-lane road. It was turned into a four-lane road only recently, the construction of which caused users much inconvenience for a long time. Old beautiful trees along the road were cut down. The people were told the congestions were only temporary till construction was over; then they would have a beautiful, smooth flowing road. Well, except for peak periods, it is smooth flowing enough now. But MPPJ has a new vision. It wants to convert residential houses along it to commercial buildings; thus probably the need for a bigger road for the expected higher traffic and for parking.
The quiet, enclosed, self-contained Taman Petaling, off Jalan Gasing, is to be linked to Pantai Dalam, Kuala Lumpur side, by opening one end of Jalan 5/46. It is now a local residential road. To cater for the expected heavy traffic, it will be turned into a four-lane road. The road is also to cater for a proposed high-rise apartment building at a vacant lot at the other end of the road.
Connecting a self-contained community to another community is a formula for inviting extra pass-through traffic, disrupting tranquility and air quality. Taman Tun Dr Ismail in Kuala Lumpur is an example of a quiet community because it is connected to the outside world only through a main trunk road. Traffic within it is entirely local.
Further, MPPJ proposes that Jalan Tanjung (5/4) and Jalan Chantek (5/13) be changed from local residential roads to four-lane ones, which will spoil the serenity of Section 5. These roads are next to the green lung of Bukit Gasing. I hope in their grand vision MPPJ is not going to connect the roads to the other Kuala Lumpur side, by cutting through the hill sometime in future. Bukit Gasing must be preserved as a green lung, one of the few remaining ones, as it is, as the plan indeed states.
According to the plan, "these two roads must be widened so that the road into Bukit Gasing can be identified clearly." And for what, may I ask? Since Bukit Gasing will only be minimally developed (as it should be), what is the point? I see no reason at all for four-lane roads in this very quiet area. And big roads divide communities.
The present four-lane Jalan Universiti too will be changed to a six-lane road.
Vicious circle
These changes are hardly desirable to PJ residents. We expect our councillors would plan to make our quality of life better over time, not worse by bringing to our front doors massive roads with their accompanying noise and air pollutions. We expect empty lots to be turned into recreation parks, not more high rises. The Gasing area has enough high-rises as it is already. People crave for open and green spaces. This can be seen by the numbers that throng the few parks that are available.
Roads are to be widened or created anew to cater for increasing traffic. This is due to more areas being opened for residential, commercial and industrial purposes or areas being redesignated as high-density. All these of course mean more people and more traffic. It sounds very much like a vicious circle; a positive feedback loop, in engineering parlance. More roads, wider roads, attract more traffic which require even bigger and more roads which attract more traffic... ad nauseam .
In 1994, because of congestion on the M25 motorway in London, the British government proposed its widening to 14 lanes. The public opposed it using the feedback argument. Londoners knew they were just inviting more traffic and more pollution. The project was cancelled on this very argument.
The average speed of London traffic now is the same as at the time of horse-driven carriages. The average speed of Southern California, which has the best road infrastructure in the world, has gone down from the 33 miles per hour in 1989. The infrastructure also takes up a lot of land. Half of the space in US cities are taken up for road transport purposes, and reaches two-thirds in Los Angeles [as described in Dunia Terancam , by Rosli Omar and Zaini Ujang (editors)].
The more land is paved and covered by roads, buildings and other structures (or trees, forests, cut) the less rain water seeps into the ground. Water thus rushes too quickly filling up drains and rivers and thus is more likely to overspill. Conversion of land for buildings and roads as well as rapid construction resulting in silted drains cause flash floods. Deepening of drains and rivers merely transfers the water faster somewhere else; the slightest obstruction downstream causes massive flooding, worse than ever before. (Instead, we should preserve our wetlands that are excellent absorbers of excess water.) These are the reasons why floods in the Klang Valley are setting worse and worse records.
Global warming is possibly another factor, as insurance companies might testify. Increasing pay-outs are making them aware of this cause.
The same phenomenon occurs with traffic: roads without obstruction, from traffic lights for example, quickly carry traffic. If there is some obstruction at some point farther on, from toll booths or adjoining traffic, etc., congestion quickly accumulates. The Kerinchi link connecting Federal Highway and Jalan Damansara is touted by its toll operator as the fastest way to connect the two. Maybe so. But the additional connections between the two have caused severe congestion on the two roads prior to the points where the connections go off and come in.
The real solutions to flooding and traffic congestion then are to reduce the volume of water that gets into drains and cars on roads in the first place. How do we do this?
Root cause
The problem of congested traffic calling for more and wider roads, overflowing drains calling for more and deeper drains, and shortage of water supply for the Klang Valley calling for more and bigger dams have the same root cause: unsustainable growth, population and economic, fueled by a consumerist-society. The Klang Valley has the highest growth for both, with about nine percent for the economy in the last decade, according to the Eighth Malaysia Plan report.
According to the same report, car and motorcycle ownerships for Kuala Lumpur increases from 351 per 1,000 people in 1990 to 986 in 2000. Taking a very conservative estimate, this means an annual increase rate of those vehicles is 18 percent. At this rate it means that roughly every four years the number of cars and motorcycles double (say, one million in 1990; two million 1994; four million 1998, etc.). No wonder the authorities are like dogs chasing their own tails, never quite catching up to provide enough roads. And no wonder, too, since I moved to the city some long years ago, the roads have never been free of those ever-present ugly construction red plastic cones.
Economic growth brings, along with the products that we want, the unwanted products pollution and waste, also in proportion to the growth. Technology cannot hope to remove all waste, even if we have the means, since the more waste to get rid off, the more it costs. The faster the waste is produced, the longer it takes for technology (and environment) to remove it.
The authorities solutions to demand for more water, roads and drains have been similar: supply-side management to overcome the effects rather than demand-side management of the root cause, i.e., tackling the reasons for the existence of the demand in the first place. It is time then we implement what we have been giving lip-service to: sustainable development development that does not use resources nor give off wastes that prevent future generations from enjoying the same resources and the same good environmental quality.
Sustainable development means that if the cost of bringing some resource to a place places unacceptable damage to society and environment then development has to go to the resource. In the case of water, the Klang Valley has exhausted all of its water resources and has to depend on water transfer from dams to be built in Pahang. Furthermore, the proposed Kelau dam for this project can only supply water till 2018. The unsustainable growth of seven percent on water demand in the valley, where supply needs to double every 10 years, then require other dams to be built. The environmental damage is unacceptable. And more Orang Asli, as in Kelau, Peretak and Gerachi (for Selangor dam), will have to move, to make way for development that further impoverishes them.
Paradigm shift
Industries that are water-intensive are prime candidates for moving out. And, moving out labour-intensive industries will reduce population growth pressures (as done in Singapore). Capital-intensive, non-water-intensive industries should replace them. A more equitable development that spreads employment, income and wealth to other areas can then happen.
An economic growth rate that does not require a massive influx of foreign labour must be the upper limit of this sustainable growth. At present, we welcome foreigners when the going is good but are too quick to make them unwelcome at the slightest economic downturn.
But, of course in the long run, the ultimate sustainable rate is zero, where depreciation value equals investment. (As many have described, life under zero economic growth does not entail a boring existence.) And likewise for population growth, zero. This is where the replacement rate equals the death rate, i.e., two children per couple. Forget about trying to achieve the mad vision of a teeming 70 million population presumably proposed to provide for a larger consumer base. We have enough problems as it is.
Sustainable growth reduces pressure on more housing, buildings, and roads. This reduces pressure on paving open spaces and cutting down trees and forests which enable more green lungs to absorb pollution, giving off oxygen, and allowing water to seep underground and less into drains. Flooding will be less severe. Roads can be planned properly and water demand stabilised. Sustainable growth enables nature to cope with pollution better.
I dislike the much abused term "paradigm shift". But if ever there is a need to justify the term, it is now. Our planners need to have such a shift from the conventional growth-is-good-in-itself the higher the better to a sustainable development mode. Would our politicians have the will and wisdom to do this?
Maybe it is high time that local councillors and Datuk Bandars are elected, as they were used to into the 1960s, to make them more accountable to the public.
Dr ROSLI OMAR is an academic interested in the impact of science and technology on society and environment (being bred on the white heat of technology creed himself), be they dams, genetic engineering, or machines. He believes that science and technology, as used at present, are sustaining an unsustainable development the worst of all possible paradoxes.
