DURING his one-day visit to Penang in 2009, the late Lee Kuan Yew (former prime minister of Singapore) said our northwestern state was in need of better roads, bridges, airports and other communication links.
The republic’s Sunday Times quoted him as saying that all these would be key in attracting investments from Singapore.
And he stressed the need for Penang to work with its federal counterparts to secure funding for such infrastructure.
At the time, Lim Guan Eng was just one year into his job as chief minister after being swept in by the political tsunami of 2008.
He spent close to an hour with Lee, who also had a 15-minute discussion with members of the state executive council on that day.
Fast forward to 2023, the jams have gone from bad to horrible.
Most Penang residents will tell you they dread the long weekends and holidays, when a deluge of out-of-state cars flood the already vehicle-saturated island.
To cope, some of us plan out-of-state trips ourselves.
The rest of us stay home, cook something nice, binge watch TV shows or plan marathon computer gaming sessions.
In the last decade or so, many roads on the island were changed from two-way streets to one way.
While it makes commuting distances longer, it does allow for a faster traffic flow.
But these are “systems upgrades”.
If Penang is to be a metropolis a decade or so into the future, then infrastructure-wise, more “physical upgrades” can be or should be done.
Tun Dr Lim Chong Eu Expressway is Penang’s only spine road and it is often congested at points where vehicles need to exit to old parts of the island.
Many of the island’s roads were constructed for horse buggies and bullock carts in the colonial days, planned by engineers who never imagined the existence of cars or travel exceeding 40km/h.
The streets in the heritage enclave and the winding road between Batu Ferringhi and Tanjung Bungah are classic examples of colonial-era roads.
Any incident on these roads will set users’ travel plans back by hours.
Accidents, a vehicle breaking down or, most commonly, someone double parking will start a gridlock stretching for kilometres.
To be fair to the Penang government, it has the Penang Transport Master Plan with several of its components in the pipeline.
We have been told the Bayan Lepas Light Rail Transit project is more or less a sure thing, with eight submissions received from local and international consortiums for the project’s pre-qualification exercise.
We also have the 6km toll-free Ayer Itam-Lebuhraya Tun Dr Lim Chong Eu bypass (Package Two), which is expected to reduce travel time.
This will benefit Penang residents in the long term, especially those living in Ayer Itam, Bandar Baru Ayer Itam and Paya Terubong.
The bypass will have 1.8km on the ground and the other parts will be elevated as viaduct structures (65%), tunnels (20%) and grade sections (15%).
We have seen how the Bukit Kukus paired road project – touted as the highest elevated highway in the country at 61.5m above ground – has relieved traffic congestion.
People living in Ayer Itam and Paya Terubong – which have population densities almost equal to that of Kuala Lumpur – praise the Bukit Kukus road every day when they drive to factories in Bayan Lepas, to and from work.
Coming back to the Package Two project, work progress has reached almost 30%. Earthworks and slope clearing are visible in several areas, notably Island Park, Island Glades and Jalan Yeap Chor Ee.
For now, earthwork monitoring must be carried out regularly, especially in hilly areas where works are ongoing for the project.
Taking precautions against disasters is highly vital whenever there is heavy rainfall, and there are clear and comprehensive guidelines on hilly land development for all stakeholders to follow.
Tragedies have happened before as over the years, Penang has been hit with landslides.
One of the worst was on Oct 21, 2017, when 11 workers were buried by a landslide at a construction site in Lengkok Lembah Permai, Tanjung Bungah.
A year later, another major landslide took the lives of nine foreign workers and injured four others at the aforementioned Bukit Kukus road project site.
Former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad once said, “To benefit from the past, we have to pick and choose what we want to repeat and what we want to avoid and forget.
“The lesson of history is not just about knowing what happened but knowing about mistakes which brought misfortune and suffering in the past and avoiding making the same mistakes.”
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