Ever since the Asian financial meltdown in 1998, our nation has became a debt addict with budget deficit running unstoppable for a whopping 16 years.

I hereby understand the urgency of the matter and willing to accept budget cutting. But my love for you, is not that unconditional.

Petrol subsidy is a wrong policy from start. With more and more cars running on road, an ever increasing average oil price and people staying further from workplace, subsidy like this is unsustainable.

It’s true that the government need the subsidy cut urgently. But when you take something from my plate, I expect you to give something back too.

Perhaps this is the time that we finally need to be really serious about our public transport. What I propose here is a qualitative improvement to the public transport.

I can see from recent years that there’s an expanding service of our train service in kl. Quantitative improvement like this is something worth noting but this is not enough.

First, I want a set of measurable performance metric of our public transport system to be published in newspaper every month.

One of the most important metric to me is the reliability of bus/train arrival time. If you tell me that if I take the bus from a station near my home at 7.30am and expect to reach my office at 8.30am, you need to show me that you keep your promise consistently on a daily basis.

The other metrics are equally important such as the capacity utilization of public transport during peak hour. Please response faster to add more buses or train when there’s an overcapacity and vice versa.

Second, I want you to review your performance every month. Tell me what things that you have tried to improve the performance, what works and what don’t work and what new plan you have for the next month. There’s a lot of things we can learn from our neighbour Singapore alone such as creating a “Bus or Taxi only” lane in peak hour.

Third, we need a functional website that will help us to plan our journey and also calculate our fare. This service will include all the train and buses and show us how can we get from one point to another point by taking a multiple buses or trains.

Mr Government you gotta understand. We are the citizens that truly believe in “you help me, I help you”. You can’t simply ask us to stop driving without giving us a reliable alternative. My proposed steps aim to restore public confidence in our public transport system and the exciting part of my proposal is that, it won’t burn a hole in your budget to implement. (And Mr Government, I believe that this also help you to win our vote back in the city. This is what you truly need, right?)

I will like to remain my optimism in this country but Mr Government, you gotta start showing that you know something about managing this country. As far as I can see, there’re still a lot of talented people in this country that knows how to get things done. Please start gather them under your wings and promote a constructive idea exchanging environment.

Thank you.