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[Malaysia] Report: Treasury Wants RM3b Cut To Health Ministry’s 2026 Budget
(codeblue.galencentre.org)
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
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You jest OP, but many in the major cities are already stuck in traffic literally every day, and I have no doubt many are doomscrolling while sitting there.
Malaysia bought so hard into car-centrism they basically don't have a functioning public transport system anywhere, at least not 12 years ago, not even in major cities like Kuala Lumpur. I heard Penang is trying to change this a few years ago, though mostly only on the island, but I reckon it's going to take them much beyond another 15 years for there to be any tellable change in people's minds.
I'm not sure where you get your info from, but Kuala Lumput and Greater Kuala Lumpur(Klang Valley or area surrounding Kuala Lumpur) does have functioning public transport. In fact it's the only city in Malaysia that has a functioning and connected LRT/MRT/Monorail line. It also have the worst road system/design in the entire Malaysia from my experience.
Public transit development are concentrated in that specific part of Malaysia because of how horrible car driving experience is, it can turn a 15min drive to 1 and a half hour, even with the abundance of highway that cut everywhere. The rest of the Malaysia just doesn't want public transit, with plenty of nonsensical excuse.
The current government reintroduced buses everywhere two or so years ago where the local government failed to give a crap, but it still not enough ridership to justify spending more of it because unsurprisingly, when cars are given the top priority and buses doesn't have a upper hand, people won't use it.
I still remember when i'm a teenager i can just hop on a bus to go to school and back without being late, and going to mall for hangout just with bus but nowadays, bus are novelty. The whole budget cut to fund wastage is just pissing me off.
From my original comment:
I've used public transport back 12 years ago to try get around places. It depends on what your level of acceptance is, but 30-40 mins for a bus in SBJ that's constantly late isn't what I could call functional. Taking more than an hour, using a mix of buses and LRTs, to make a journey that would've taken just a 25 min drive on a good day, can't be considered functional. Perhaps it works more reliably in specific areas, but we can't call a handful of bus routes a system, not when the larger system feels more like patchworks than a thoughtful solution. I'm not trying to deny your experience, but as someone who didn't grow up around the area, in an era before transit tracking systems were more accessible, I had to rely on someone to sort of guide me through the patchwork, and even then, there's just too much time spent waiting around, or you have to make a run after getting off a couple of minutes away, I remember running across a bridge just to catch another bus on time.
Too many Malaysians are too utterly subservient to their circumstances, only looking at what's in front and around them and never question why they're in that situation. "That's life," or, "That's fate," they say, as if being realistic is to only focus on what's right in front of you, instead of understanding why something happened and devising ways to fix issues at the root of it. I'm ranting and stereotyping, so I digress. I don't live there anymore, so forgive me if my image of the country and its people is out of date.
And I'm not surprised why local governments aren't giving a flying crap to public transit. It's also ineffective policy from the federal gov to just install bus routes without using carrots and sticks to pull local governments and the Rakyat (let's use their term of choice) away from cars; either they're being naive, or they are still more inclined to keeping the O&G and car manufacturers happy, in which case they're simply virtue signalling.
And now that we're in an oil price spike that may end up being a hill than just a spike, the reality that the country is overly reliant on oil is likely just slapping everyone hard in the face right now, with many not even knowing that there's an option where they wouldn't need to be slapped as hard. The federal gov has to step in with more subsidies, and with that, they're gonna have to cut something else. If they aren't using this crisis as an opportunity to promote the reduction in reliance on oil, then, once again, they're either naive, or we know where they stand on cars.
I apologize if this comes across as too critical of the country, the government, and its people. I'm sure there are people pushing for changes. I'm just not hopeful about their chances.
You're absolutely right about what a joke of a country it is in a transit point of view, but i'm just not sure what's the threshold of "functioning" are for each person. For someone coming in from, say, singapore, the public transit in kuala lumpur is laughable, but from my perspective of someone who lived in kuala lumpur about 20 years ago, comparing the transit to where i live now it's day and night. I can go places in Kuala lumpur with the combination of train and walking, and we do walk a lot back then, but here? Cycling is simply faster than bus.
Is it functional? I think yes. Is it bad? Absolutely. I think your issue with the transit system is the bus from what i read here, and i do fully agree with that. But if you live near train station and work/going places near train station, it would be the cheapest and best way to travel, and for that it's absolutely functional.
The definition makes the argument here really. If being functional means that the system is functional for only a select few, then to the select few, sure it's functional, but to everyone else, it's not. If public transit is meant to be "public" and not just a "transit", then a system functional only to a few isn't what I can consider to have met expectation of its own definition. I'm certainly being strict about it, and you are free to keep your perspective; I'm not here to change it. I used to live in an area outside of Selangor where buses vanished after being virtually nonexistent, and public transit in KL & Selangor hasn't given me the slightest bit of sense that it's reliable, even before I experienced a better system elsewhere in the world.
Some part of my reason of outright calling it non-functional is political: I've set the bar higher than just having a system that works for those lucky or rich enough to live near a train or bus station. Imagine if you don't have access to the benefits of a public policy or system that only a few seem to enjoy, and these few people go around and tell others that the system is being functional. I'm not sure if that'll sit well with most people, especially when it's something that is or is close to a basic right.