MALAYSIANS have always turned to humour to cope with absurdity, and our latest act is no exception: a viral, tongue-in-cheek campaign imploring New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to come fix our potholes.
Mamdani, after all, built a reputation in his first 100 days in office for swiftly clearing more than 100,000 potholes from New York's battered streets. This is precisely the kind of responsiveness that made him such an appealing, if improbable, saviour for frustrated Malaysian road users.
Commenters piled on. One joked that Mamdani was probably still trying to work out which New York street was even being shown. Another asked, only half in jest, whether Malaysia could simply "borrow" him.
It's funny until it isn't. Potholes are an inconvenience and also a hazard that occasionally turns fatal. On March 6, Koperal Muhammad Fakrullah Jamal, a traffic policeman riding pillion on a colleague's motorcycle, died after the motorcycle skidded while swerving to avoid a pothole in Hulu Terengganu, according to Bernama.But potholes are only the most visible symptom of something larger. I suspect the real reason Malaysians are flocking to a foreign mayor is that they have simply stopped expecting their own local authorities to listen.
That frustration became vivid for me recently when I watched Selangor state executive councillor for investment, trade and mobility Ng Sze Han conduct a walking audit around the new LRT3 stations.
Cynical as it may sound, there was something almost refreshing about watching a state official personally navigate missing footpaths, blocked tactile paving and pedestrian routes that simply stop making sense.
But it also raised an obvious question that many netizens asked: what exactly had the Shah Alam City Council been doing in the meantime?
There are many ways to apportion blame here, and each has its merits. But I think the more honest answer is structural; that our local councils operate within a system that does not sufficiently incentivise routine, on-the-ground inspection of the public realm.
When a state executive councillor has to personally walk the ground to discover that commuters cannot safely reach a multi-billion-ringgit transit hub, something has clearly broken down in municipal oversight.
Part of the problem is sequencing. Local authorities invest enormous energy upfront in planning and approvals, but auditing of completed infrastructure gets far less attention once construction wraps up. Projects get approved, buildings go up, and only afterwards does the public discover that a footpath doesn't connect to anything, or that crossing a six-lane road on foot is practically a gamble.
This is especially acute in Selangor and its inseparable neighbour, Kuala Lumpur, where urban municipalities like Petaling Jaya, Subang Jaya and Ampang Jaya oversee thousands of streets, neighbourhoods and transit precincts. These are areas with a particularly high youth population, both local and from out of state, who feel these gaps most directly.
I especially appreciate the observation made by social media page Urbanist Kuala Lumpur: suppose that Ng conducts one walking audit every two weeks, and even if the task is reduced to just 1,000 areas, Ng would be in his nineties to go through them all. It's a useful, if slightly absurd, reminder that relying on elected officials to personally discover missing footpaths at Selangor's scale is simply untenable.
What's saddening is how comprehensively the public has learned to stop expecting anything else. Years of administrative inertia have calcified into a kind of institutionalised cynicism, pushing people toward private workarounds instead. Walking is unpleasant? Buy a car. Outdoor spaces feel unsafe for children? Retreat behind the walls of a gated development.
We need to move past the illusion that one sufficiently energetic politician can personally inspect their way out of a systemic problem.
The first step is giving local governments the power to actually act on neighbourhood-level issues. I'm aware this brushes up against the long-running debate over restoring local council elections as currently, councils are state appointments, and that question deserves its own discussion entirely.
Regardless of how they are selected, councils need to be properly resourced, fiscally and otherwise, to manage the tangible, everyday stuff: potholes, blocked pavements, broken streetlights.
Equally important is making enforcement routine rather than reactive. Independent walking, accessibility and connectivity audits should be a mandatory condition before any development is certified. Transparent digital dashboards showing outstanding issues, the party responsible, and resolution status would also go some way toward ensuring complaints are actually tracked rather than swallowed whole.
And finally, while Ng's walking audits are commendable, they cannot rest on his shoulders alone. These audits need to include residents and community members, particularly those who experience the pedestrian environment differently, including children, young people, the elderly, and people with visual or mobility impairments.
Walking every route alongside them, and listening to their lived experience, is how we actually answer the questions that matter: can a child cross this road safely? Can a wheelchair user reach that entrance? Does this footpath connect continuously to the street network around it, or does it just stop?
The response to Ng's walking audit, and to the Mamdani memes before it, tells us that Malaysians care deeply about their streets, sidewalks and public spaces. It also tells us they are exhausted by a system where complaints routinely fall on deaf ears. We need people walking their own neighbourhoods and councils that are required to listen when they do.
Reclaiming the public realm in the Klang Valley will take something more durable than the occasional walkabout. What it calls for are local institutions that routinely inspect their own streets, fix what's broken, and are genuinely answerable to the people who use those streets every single day.
Malaysian youth advocate Jonathan Lee Rong Sheng traces his writing roots to The Star’s BRATs programme. The views expressed here are his own.
