EARLIER this week, UN-Habitat’s World Urban Forum 9 (WUF9) at KLCC Convention Centre came to a grand end. 

Boasting over 25,000 registrants from 165 countries, WUF9 was touted as the “world’s premier conference to share practices and knowledge on how cities are built, planned and managed”.

Everywhere I looked, Malaysian hospitality was abundant and tours to “success stories” such as KL Sentral, Putrajaya, and the River of Life

Still, there was one major irony. As a world stage for sustainable urbanism experts and practices, WUF9 unintentionally exposed the shortcomings of Malaysia’s cities when held up against the best of the best. 

Nowhere was this more obvious than in the area of urban transportation. Urban transportation should be fast, efficient, sustainable, green, accessible, and equitable – definitely far from what Malaysia has now! 

Although there’s much to cover, I’ll focus on three main issues in urban transportation where we should learn from our WUF9 peers. 
    
Make walking great again

Walking is still – or should be – the most basic, common, sustainable and accessible form of transportation.

Yet we can’t seem to get this right. I cringed when a WUF9 panel speaker, who is also a wheelchair user, informed her audience she could not travel the 500m from her hotel to the KLCC Convention Centre due to the dilapidated and dangerous pedestrian infrastructure. 

Every year we have over 500 pedestrian deaths in Malaysia – and as of 2013, 44% were elderly persons. 

Some Malaysian cities are upgrading their sidewalks – such as the Medan Pasar heritage core and River of Life projects in Kuala Lumpur. 

However, what we are missing is a comprehensive commitment to “make walking great again”. 

This not only means having sidewalks accessible to people with disabilities, but also fixing dangerous intersections, reducing road space for vehicles, slowing down fast vehicles, and even creating fun, vibrant, relaxing and safe environments that Malaysians will enjoy walking in. 

As Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) said in the release of its Pedestrians First tool: “Walkability is not just a sidewalk, it’s a whole system of design and infrastructure”. 

Although walkability might still be an alien concept for Malaysian cities, I saw many resources for walkability design and implementation displayed at WUF9. 

There were tons of policy papers, toolkits (like ITDP’s Pedestrians First), design guidelines and successful case studies including cities in developing countries (such as Pune, India).

Improve the breadth, depth, accuracy and transparency of our data

“If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it” – this was said over and over at WUF9. 

At a panel on “Managing and Measuring Expanding Public Transport”, I was blown away by two cases of innovations in urban transportation data.  

In the first study, the European Union Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy designed a benchmark to compare cities across the EU in an identical manner – not an easy feat given the extent of geographic differences. 

This benchmark also took into account the size of cities’ urban centres, population distribution, exact locations of public transport stops, and frequency of departures. 

It not only enabled cities to rank themselves but also see precisely which transportation services in what locality needed to be improved. 

In the second study, African startup Where Is My Transport’s “Cape Town Taxi Project” collected data on over 1,000 taxi routes, common stopping points, fares and frequency, and made that data available online to everyone. 

Their study mapped informal transportation services, which reportedly account for up to 80% of public transportation passenger trips in the developing world. 

This data is not captured in analyses of formal transportation services (such as in the earlier EU example), which makes it all the more vital to understanding the bigger picture.  

At that same panel, I was disappointed with the third case study presented by SPAD (Land Public Transport Commission). 

SPAD spent most of its time rattling off a list of public transport megaprojects in Malaysia. It ended with one slide that showed overall ridership numbers and customer satisfaction levels increasing year-on-year, with no further breakdown. 

Later, I asked the SPAD representative when we would see more detailed and open data or if SPAD planned to collaborate with such data providers and analysts to improve data collection and decision-making. 

Instead of a conclusive answer, I was told to wait for a tentative “press briefing in Q2”. 

Include, not exclude

Just because a train station, bus stop, bicycle dock, sidewalk or transportation service exists, this doesn’t mean people will feel comfortable using it. 

We need to measure and fix the equity gaps among transportation users – which are often influenced by factors such as income level, disability, age, race and gender. 

Take, for example, gender gaps in cycling – studies have revealed women make up fewer than 25% of bicycle trips in the United States, due to social stigma and safety fears

On the local front, people with disabilities have borne the brunt of poor transportation design. 

For example, wheelchair user Peter Tan recently wrote about his wheelchair’s casters consistently getting stuck in the gap between platform and train at the Sungai Buloh MRT station and KLIA Transit stop at KL Sentral – at great risk to his safety and life.  

How do we fix these problems? At WUF9, transportation experts stressed that firstly, we must use participatory methods in transportation planning to ensure user needs are properly heard and met. 

Users must have a chance to give critical feedback – via focus groups, community discussions, surveys, and visioning exercises – before, during and after the implementation of transportation projects. 

Secondly, policies and programmes to promote social inclusion must go hand-in-hand with transportation infrastructure. 

If we don’t make an effort to include users who are marginalised, can we really claim our public transportation is actually “public”? 

Moving forward

Let’s come back to the question of “So Malaysia hosted WUF9 – now what?” 

More than anything, I believe WUF9’s value lies in showing us where we stand in the world and what is possible if we are serious about improving our cities. 

The good news is, we are not alone. At WUF9, we had hundreds if not thousands of cities, technical bodies, advocacy groups, development banks, and so on at our doorstep! 

We have no shortage of potential project partners, advisors and funders whose expertise we can reap for our benefit.  

My hope in post-WUF9, we will see political will and concrete action to improve urban transportation. 

Otherwise, it would be a crying shame to have hosted the “world’s premier conference” on sustainable urbanism, but not have actually done anything about it. – February 15, 2018.

* Sharon W.H. Ling reads The Malaysian Insight.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.