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...