Philip Khor

Good morning ya’ll. I’m blogging LIVE from my office in Jalan P Ramlee, Kuala Lumpur.

When I say LIVE, I mean, during office hours… on the job! Ok, so I have a valid excuse (waiting for videos to export). So here I am!

On the way to work via the Rapid KL LRT train, I had 3 lightbulb moments:

1. Short URLs

Have you guys used bit.ly, is.gd and goog.le or youtu.be? Yeah, URLs are very long nowadays, with uber long codes which customises your experience, among others. And good domain names, like all good girls, are taken!

Back in Form 2, high school, I created a simple website for us to “hang out”. It was the days of IRC and ICQ, and yes, those exploratory days were awsm. I used a service called go.to to redirect my angelfire (now defunct) website. I believe it was http://go.to/2g2k and http://go.to/f3g

So if you think you’re shmuck and all uber leet with this short URL thingy, I was there literarlly 10 years ago!

2. LRT Prices

Ok, here’s a bit of boring Economics. Please bear with me.

I get charged RM 2.20 for a train ride to KL town one way. I propose DOUBLING the fare to say, RM 5 one way. The reason is, the freaking train is too squishy. At rush hour, even if 5 trains were to poop at a station in 4 minutes, there would not be enough capacity to ferry the rush hour crowd. The 4 coach trains helped somewhat, but most of the times, the 2-coaches would hog the way, creating a backlog.

The reason for the increase in fare is to give Rapid KL more money to upgrade their trains. If managed properly, we could have trains whizzing across each station in 60 second intervals, ample spacing to meet regulations (if any) of the country.

For the first 12 months, we will see a slight dip in passenger numbers. Good news for rich working people. But once the coffers have been filled up, and the whole line gets awsm 4-coach upgrades the benefits from then on would be exponential. Increase in frequency, increase in capacity per trip. So yeah, increase train fares for a better tomorrow!

(btw RAPID KL monthly passes should help ease burdens of REALLY regular users)

3. I saw Wai Nyan (Wai Peng’s brother) on the train just now. He was either deep in thought or meditation so I didn’t bother him.

I just wanna say how nice it was to ride the Rapid KL train. Although squishy, the atmosphere was silent. Occational taps on the phone keypads, but that was it. I haven’t seen so high density of humans being shipped form A-to-B.

Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) should be implemented in the streets of KL immediately to alleviate the traffic problems. Like, PJ hilton, RM 2 … Mid Valley RM 4 .. every single time you pass through the gantry. Sure, people will be f*king pissed. But hey, if you can afford to buy and maintain a car, what is RM 3000 a year (estimate) in tolls and ERPs gonna cost to you? Minimal. Very minimal.

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