Non disabled-friendly Kuala Lumpur

The following post was a comment that I did on Peter Tan's blog on "Kuala Lumpur City of Barriers".

Hi Peter,

Please allow me to rant about the issue of accessibility of the street environment. It is interesting that you did a wheel-about around the Masjid Jamek area, and highlighted the issues of the lack of accessibility, safety and usability of the streets, pavement and crossings.

We did a report on Pedestrian-friendly Kuala Lumpur back then in 1999, and it was also sponsored by JICA. During the Interim Stage, DBKL decided to take out the title below : "Disabled Friendly Study", hence it was watered down after that, meaning disabled-friendly is not the focus. I wondered what DBKL did with the report. I assumed some of the findings were referred to, but since you highlighted the problems, I realised that the same problems are there.

That reminded me of the question that I posed to a DBKL engineer at a seminar. How come the pavement heights are not 6 inches (15cm) maximum but get to be even 8 inches to a foot at times? He said that is because of wanting the monsoon drain grilles to let the water drain away easily. He also said that when they lay the roads with tarmac, they needed the extra inches so that when they top it up, the pavement is still high enough.

Sorry but I think its all a load of bullshit. Firstly, rather than concentrating on the monsoon drain grilles to be at a certain spot along the underside of the pavement, say after every 30 ft, why not have the whole pavement grilles at the side, so more holes are available for drainage, and also lower the height of the grilles. Secondly, why not scrape the old tarmac from the road first and then re-lay the new tarmac rather than do a patched up job layer upon layer, so that a certain height of tarmac is achieved everytime.

The reason why these issues are the basis for unaccessible curbs are simple. It's a design and maintenance problem, and when they decided to go above 6 inches, the ramped curb if built will not have the correct gradient / slope to be usable.

So the problems that I highlighted here then suggests that it became impossible for them to implement the legislation which by the way never got gazetted at all. I remember now that it was Malaysian Standards MS 1331 - Disabled Access for Outside of Buildings. The problem was when they did that MS 1331, they "copied" the British version. You see, although Malaysia followed British Administrative Laws, when we expand our townships, we never actually followed through, hence we had designed and built the environment to our own set of standards. What is riduculous is the fact that they cancelled MS 1331 which never got to be gazetted through an Act like the Town and Country Planning Act but instead they got an academic to do a set of guidelines. Guidelines are just a set of administrative document, which is not even a standard. At least standard you can go through SIRIM, and make sure of the quality.We only got MS 1884 which is for "inside buildings" (gazetted).

Also many ministries are involved with different elements of the street environment, so that is one of the reasons for poor coordination and management. Min. of Transport - Highways Act, Pedestrian crossings and lights/warnings; Min. of Entrepeneur - Public Vehicle Licensing that determine bus-stops locations; DBKL (?) - Prime Minister's Dept. / Fed. Territory Min.; Outside buildings area / LRT stations (?) - Min. of Housing and Local Govt.; Min. of Public Works (?) - Pedestrian Bridges, Flyovers(?) ( I am actually assuming these functions to the ministries, need to confirm it though...)

Perhaps we should propose for a Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee (DPTAC) like in the UK that is a "statutory body" established under the UK Transport Act 1985.