Traffic Woes

It's the rainy season and in KL that means one thing: SuperDuper Traffic Jams on the way home in the evening. Aside from KL being "organically" grown without any holistic planning, I reckon that drivers could be better equipped with traffic information. Relying on the ITIS will probably lead you nowhere, unfortunately.

I was interested to find that Google Maps has a "traffic" feature which is supposed to show you traffic conditions at key intersections, coded to red, yellow and green. Unfortunately KL is not covered yet. This would really be helpful for long suffering KL drivers.

An interesting source of traffic data may be the mobile phone operators - they have data on how fast mobile phones move from cell to cell, so it's a simple matter of matching it with a map of existing towers (which Google Maps already has) to get a halfway decent map of traffic.

Google Maps wins by having more traffic through its service, and the telcos win by having Google pay them for data.

And of course KL drivers win by knowing which shortcut to take to avoid losing 2 hours of their precious lives every day to traffic!

Now the only thing after that would be to prevent accidents by people gazing at their mobile phones while driving!! :)

Illegal Parking in the City

Seems that this is an intractable problem, made worse by inconsistent enforcement and unruly motorists. I wonder if this can be alleviated by having very focused "operasi saman parking" done over a period of a few weeks, area-by-area in KL.

Another thing to do may be to include in the parking ticket, a map of public car parks nearby, including their hourly rates.  Sort of a message that says "look, this is illegal parking, but legal and less costly (if you get a ticket) options are nearby and not that inconvenient"

You can even get the parking operators to print out the fliers - it's to their benefit to get more motorists to park there, anyway!

Lights in tunnels

I wonder what the rationale is for having fewer lights lit (therefore making the tunnel dimmer) during the day. This is very apparent in the KLCC tunnels and also the tunnel on Jalan Tun Razak near the RSGC.

This is counter-intuitive as it's probably better to have all the lights on during the day, so as to minimize the contrast between bright daylight and dark tunnel during the day.

It can actually get quite dangerous as the contrast can be so great that drivers' eyes can't really adjust and real trouble can happen if there's something in the way (pedestrian, broken down bikes, cars, etc)

It's the small things...

Teaching English in Rural Areas

I was just wondering if it makes any sense to have post-graduate (those who graduated with a Bachelor's degree) students become Teaching Assistants in rural areas to help with teaching of Maths/Science/English. They can be given academic credits, and a minimal salary.

These TA's should come from not only public universities but also private ones. And we should not limit to only local students - the international folks can also participate (in fact they'd probably pay for the privilege! Imagine that!)

I'm sure there's a lot more details in the implementation, but hey, I'm a vision type person :)

Cushioning the Impact

Most people pretty much has accepted that the world economy will not be getting any better, and that the cost of necessities (and no, an HTC Touch Diamond does not count as a necessity!) is going to continue its rise.

The concern is that there is no comprehensive social net in Malaysia, to help with the most needy families with their basic needs, especially in the light of potential loss of employment due to the slowing economy. Big, urban families are the ones most at risk.

Crime rates, petty or otherwise will probably also rise if people are desperate enough. Longer term, the effects of bad nutrition (a family was featured in one of the news dailies eating rice and rassam only! Not that I have anything against rassam, but ...) on children, especially, would impact the effectiveness of our workforce 10-15 years down the line.

So this is definitely something that we need to collectively figure out how to solve. How to get help to those that need it the most, while minimizing leakages and ensuring that fraud is kept to a minimum, so that we get the best "bang for the buck".

Perhaps it is time to explore some sort of targeted aid - where a set amount (depending on a formula based on number of people in a household, household income, household expenditures etc) is distributed to people who apply for it. Eligibility is determined via interviews and the aid "expires" after a period of time.

The aid can be distributed via MyKad (biometric features help in combating fraud) to be withdrawn via ATM, or be done via old-fashioned "food coupons" that can only be used for food items (not soft drinks or gula gula!)

Trees vs Bushes

I wonder why the folks in charge of the decorative plants at the sides of the roads choose to plant and re-plant small, bushy plants rather than big tall angsana trees. Higher maintenance? They sure would be a nice addition to our local scenery, providing shade and helping negate some of the global warming effect.

And what's with the non-native palm trees everywhere, anyway?

Accountability

Of course-lah all the productivity improvements and modernizations have been attempted before with varying degrees of success. I believe that it's our model of accountability in the public sector that needs a critical look, to help maximize the probability of success of such improvement initiatives.

In the end, who is held accountable for the success of a systems implementation or productivity improvement of an agency? How is this person held accountable? Is he going to be rewarded for performance gains? Who owns the outcomes?

I would suggest that Government agencies take the step of making available to the public their top-line KPIs (again, make sure it makes sense-lah, really be focused on outcomes that either affect the citizens or the country directly) ala  the Khazanah-led GLC KPIs.

The various Ministers would be held accountable to meet these KPIs, and to have regular updates to the citizens on their progress. Eventually with the help of technology the updates would be continuously available for all citizen-activists to look at and either cheer or jeer at the facts.

The definition of these KPIs would also help to clarify overlaps and areas of responsibilities between government agencies, helping drive efficiency gains (see previous post).

The good leaders will have an opportunity to make their accomplishments well known and this will lead the public to make better informed decisions as to who they want to hold high office.

This will also help justify any salary increases or even bonuses that may come their way - after all, Ministers do play an important role in Government, and we do want to tempt enough high-caliber CEO types from the private sector to provide leadership and energy in the public sector. Well, at least I think so.