KUALA LUMPUR: City Hall’s grand cycling plans may seem ambitious, but cycling advocates are not convinced, saying that the authority lacks a cohesive masterplan and is building lanes just for the sake of having them.
Activist Gurmit Singh said City Hall had to ask itself whether the lanes were being built for recreational cyclists or for people to cycle to work.
“Cycle lanes are meaningless unless planners have an idea why they are building them.
“If they are lanes for people to go to work, then you must insist that all office spaces in the city have shower and changing rooms.
“No one is going to cycle 4 to 5km just to perspire and stink or walk into meetings drenched by rain.”
Gurmit said City Hall was “absolutely late to the party”.
As a cycling activist of 30 years, he said there were many suburbs that could be connected to the city by bicycle lanes or walkways.
He added that City Hall often fell into the cycle of building things, only to drop, retrofit or even tear them down later because they were tokenistic in nature.
“Their problem is they’ve never had a lane that is functional outside the purpose of recreation. This is because they were built for the sake of building something.”
Cycling advocate Akmal Azfar Mutalib echoed Gurmit’s sentiment and urged City Hall to stop doing things for the sake of just getting things done.
“They must get serious about cycling, instead of building things so that they can appear in newspapers.
“The only way they can get people to cycle is to have connected lanes, and start ensuring policies are sound, followed with aftercare.”
Akmal said City Hall caught the cycling bug six years ago when former mayor Tan Sri Ahmad Phesal Talib was in office, hence all policies should have been solidified to ensure new developments from then on had bicycle lanes.
He said if City Hall had enforced this then as a planning requirement for new projects, there would have been more cycle lanes.
He said there were so many missed opportunities, citing developments that have mushroomed along Sungai Klang that could have contributed to a cycle lane, such as from Mid Valley Megamall to Puchong.
He said there were many malls that had cropped up in Bangsar, Bukit Damansara and Cheras that could have contributed to these links.
“The problem with them is that they keep thinking of cycling as an afterthought, hence, we are still going in circles, talking about basics. And taxpayers are paying for this.”
He said that every department, from planning and infrastructure to landscape should have been on the same page, to realise this greater end.
“They have got to speak the same language, because we don’t have the critical mass of cyclists to demand such infrastructure.”
He said the authority’s maintenance of the lanes left much to be desired.
He said three of the six stretches of the 5.5km bicycle lane from Mid Valley to Dataran Merdeka had been closed off for years due to projects, including River of Life upgrades.
“This includes two stretches in Brickfields and the final one from Pos Malaysia to the Textile Museum. Some 2km of the lane is closed and because of this, we have to cycle in dangerous routes.
“The journey in the route is 1 or 2km longer compared with the straight route using roads from Mid Valley, but at least it was safer.
“And they didn’t even build a temporary leeway.”
What’s worse, he said, was that the bicycle route was opened about a year before River of Life upgrades took place.