The New Pot of Gold

Good evening readers, I hope that today has been a good labour day so far for all of you.

A couple weeks back, i read a story on The Edge, the story on “Rail Poltiics”, a story about the lucrative train projects up for grabs, the end of the ‘Highway Gold Rush’ and the people involved.

What I realised is that we have a lot of highways… The NPE, Kerinchi link, Guthrie, Penchala Link, NKVE, North-South Highway etc etc etc. our government spent a lot of money laying down roads for us and a lot of people made money laying down roads for us, and that’s all fine and dandy, the NPE is brilliant, I love the Kerinchi, so no complaints here. But public transport was neglected.

What’s happening now is that we’re moving on to a new “Gold Rush”, mass public transport, trains. Projects estimated to be worth about RM70 billion. Malaysians, we’re going to see a public transport boom in the next decade or so, and yes it’s pretty late, but better late than never.

“More than RM70 billion worth of rail-related projects have been slated for the next decade, including the prized RM50 billion Klang Valley mass rapid transport project.” – The Edge

But then, I thought about this, why didn’t we spend all that “Highway & Road” money on public transport and now work on highways… I mean that would have been more beneficial for all of us right? But then if we already had a public transport boom and had trains running everywhere, then we really wouldn’t need that money highways would we? Not to mention that we needed people to keep buying cars to prop up Proton but I digress, the point is we would have spent less only if the government had started with the Public Transport Boom instead of the Highway & Road Boom, it’s not like we didn’t have the tech then, we made the LRT back in ’97. But I guess if the government had spent less money overall, then the parties involved wouldn’t have made as much money and wouldn’t be able to further make more money now is this new Gold Rush.

But it’s fine, better late than never, the money was pumped into our economy and we at least have some pretty good highways, and we can mow look forward to the betterment of our public transport system. Over the next decade plus we are going to see a lot of money (billions) being poured into infrastructure, I just hope that the regular players aren’t the only ones making money form this.

“This makes rail-related construction the second fastest growing sector after oil and gas.” – The Edge (follow @Lopeztheedge on twitter)

We’re moving out of The Highway Gold Rush and into the Rail Gold Rush.

Straight from the Heart,

Arkay6