FAKE NEWS DAILY REPORT 10th October 2026 Edition
BUDGET 2027: MALAYSIA ALLOCATES RM100B TO FIGHT TRAFFIC CONGESTION BY FOLLOWING CHINA'S & SINGAPORE'S EXAMPLE IN MAKING CAR OWNERSHIP COSTLY & PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION THE BETTER CHOICE
Kuala Lumpur, Saturday:- Malaysia is set to begin implementing in stages a traffic congestion reduction masterplan, the brainchild of the transport minister which was vetted and approved unanimously by Parliament during its last pre-budget sitting recently.
In his Budget 2027 speech televised live nationwide yesterday, the finance minister announced that RM100B would be allocated for the construction of a suburb-industrial-zone-city-center inter-connected underground subway as well as overhead light rail transit system in all affected states where millions of people commute to work in nightmarish traffic conditions on a daily basis, resulting in high accident rates, flared tempers and people always late for work.
Building more roads and elevated expressways, he said, is self-defeating as new roads invites new cars and other vehicles in addition to the millions already on the road.
As everyone knows, buying and owning a car is as easy as buying a packet of cigarettes from a vending machine these days, he went on, much to the dismay of the health minister as betrayed by the look on her face, and we now have no choice but to make it a bit harder for people to do so as we are close to running out of land on which to build new roads, which is self-defeating in any case as already mentioned, he continued, which wasn't entirely true in relation to the country's vast tracts of virgin forests and undeveloped regions.
To offset this bit of inconvenience, said the minister, we will be offering those affected by the sky-high car ownership permit costs we will be introducing as well as the road using restrictions and limitations in city as well as in industrial zones, such as you'll find successfully implemented and enforced in China and Singapore, both affordable and super-efficient commuter shuttles and trains in suburb-city-center-industrial-zone interconnected subway-overhead rail transit systems, he added.
Today, he said, we have more than 26 million active, or road legal, vehicles, of which about 16 million are cars and about 9.5 million are motorcycles, all elbowing each other with other vehicles, buses, vans, lorries, trailers, tankers, cement trucks, the odd forklift, crane or sky-lift, for limited road space.
Tomorrow, he went on, according to our Google AI-assisted projections, at the rate of about 1.5 million new vehicle registrations per year, we'll be looking at a total of about 35 million active vehicles in 10 years, about 44 million active vehicles in 20 years and about 50 million active vehicles in 30 years, double the traffic congested conditions we have today, more or less, he continued.
Heaven help us all if we do not do now what we should have done years ago, he concluded.