State oversees how local councils deal with potholes

SINCE 2015, road contractors in Selangor are required to resurface roads within 24 hours of a report made on potholes.

Contractors are tasked to use a cold mix resurfacing method before bitumen is used to resurface the road within seven days to permanently fix the problem.

The premix called Cold Mix Carboncor was tested to be durable and perfect for Malaysian weather and, according to Selangor Infrastructure and Public Facilities Committee chairman Zaidy Abdul Talib, could be laid even during rainy seasons.

Since 2016, aside from attending to complaints on i-Aduan channels, local councils also had to respond to complaints transferred to them through the Intelligent Response System (i-RS) by the Smart Selangor Delivery Unit (SSDU).

Complaints made on the Waze application are transferred by the i-RS system channels to local councils, the Public Works Department (JKR), Malaysian Highway Authority (LLM) and district land office.

SSDU, under the Menteri Besar Incorporated Selangor, tracks the workflow of local councils, down to the officer in-charge.

The system tracks complaints and sends information to the specific road owner.

The 12 local councils in Selangor are now using the system which was implemented in August last year.

Since then, local councils have patched more than 3,300 potholes in total.

Feedback on the efficiency of each local council is reported to the State Economic Planning Committee (UPEN), which then updates the mentri besar on a regular basis.

SSDU programme deputy director Dr Fahmi Ngah said there were cases where local councils were not able to complete the job within five days, which is the given time frame.

However, consequences of not meeting the deadline are subject to their internal management.

“There are some pothole scenarios that naturally goes beyond five days, such as multiple potholes with structure defect in an area, which require request for quotation issuance to comply with the policy and procedure.

“Another example is due to the road not belonging to the respective local council,” he said.

Other factors were weather condition, shortage of materials and insufficiency in funds, especially towards the end of the year.

Through Waze, SSDU also has a map of potholes that have been patched or are being patched and having JKR on board helps escalate reports of potholes in their jurisdiction to them for further action as JKR road covers many of the reported areas.

Fahmi said SSDU planned to improve the system by extending it to other related parties, improve current features and functions as well as introduce new ones.

“Recently, we improved the system by adding new operational report to populate the hotspot areas.

“However, we are still monitoring the data collection and behaviour to establish the reliability of the outcome,” he said.

He added that the target was to introduce the improvements in stages throughout 2018.