City of Cars

In a bad way, an iconic thing about Kuala Lumpur and nearby city Petaling Jaya is the lack of adequate car parking spaces. Let me re-phrase that better: the total, abject lack of places for your car to park. Bad town-planning that is so chronic that even illegal spots are hard to find.

Just below my office in Taman Danau Desa (adjacent to my beloved Taman Desa), the car park bays fill up at about 9am. By ten, it’s a ‘free-for-all’ for the double-parked spots. Even parking tickets don’t deter us regulars. If double-parking isn’t available then the front of bus stops and taxi stands will do. It’s a rush to park your car where a 7 by 15 spot (or smaller) exists, no matter who you block.

This pattern continues way on till about midnight because the condominium across the road gets its fair share of nocturnal visitors.

Inevitably, getting out is the tough part as drivers attempt the automotive version of Houdini and David Copperfield. Often, attempts to squeeze out fail and Taman Danau Desa becomes a regular cacophony of car and truck horns activated by pissed off drivers. You can tell drivers by the way they horn too. Women make staccato-like beeps. Men put a little more sustained pressure on the horn, say 3 or 4 seconds. The more aggressive alpha males will slam the horn like a surgeon putting pressure on a burst jugular.

Every so often, this hooting symphony gets punctuated by the muffled thud of shattered glass – that’s the alpha male driven to breaking point, literally. A broken side window is all he needs to lift the handbrake and push the offending car forward, leaving a gap for him to pull out.

It’s getting so bad that people fear parking in legit spots for fear that they’ll get blocked by someone who’ll wander off for a drink and not come back for another hour.

So what causes all this? Over-developed commercial areas of course. I’m going to bring up a comparison with Melbourne, which may be unfair, but let’s compare the good with the not-so-good and get some ideas.

First of all, not counting the city area itself, I’ve never come across commercial shoplots in Melbourne that were more that 2 stories high. In Malaysia, it’s common to see 4 stories or even 5. In Melbourne, car parking is readily available and proportionate to the density of office space. In Malayia, parking's as easy to find as the Tasmanian Tiger.

A friend of mine left his town planning job lately. He’s going into advertising to find some sanity in the world, he says.

Now that’s saying something about town planning in Malaysia.