Metro

Tuesday May 5, 2009

Traffic congestion to worsen

By LIM CHIA YING


THE landscape in SS16 Subang Jaya is set to change dramatically once the entire stretch of commercial development sitting on land between the Carrefour and Subang Parade shopping complexes and along the Subang KTM Komuter station is fully completed.

The strip features fewer than 10 projects comprising high-rise serviced apartments and office suites.

While not all are ready, grave concerns have already been voiced about future traffic condition in the area.

The daily crawl on the Federal Highway is affecting Subang Jaya (and other parts of the Klang Valley) with traffic backed up into the township and extending over to USJ.

While the Federal Highway, with its high volume of traffic, takes the bulk of the blame, the mushrooming of development projects, also inadvertently lead to congestion.

Subang Jaya assemblyman Hannah Yeoh said since elected, she had requested for the Subang Jaya Municipal Council (MPSJ) to appoint Ikram (Public Works Institute) to conduct a thorough traffic study at SS16 and the results revealed were worrying.

“I’ve asked the council to stop further applications for development in this area.

“Each developer seems to be conducting its own traffic study and traffic assessment reports. I’m concerned that the whole area may end up in a mess if something more comprehensive is not studied,” she said.

The MPSJ engineering department had acknowledged that if the existing infrastructure (like the main road) is not upgraded or the projects not monitored, the traffic situation could worsen.

“On MPSJ’s part, we are trying to control the number of accesses into the different projects because when you have many junctions, the vehicles will spill over to the main road.

“Of course, the developers can come up with their own proposals for their accesses but it is up to us to review it.

“We want to limit congestion inside the developments itself than outside,” an official told StarMetro.

Meanwhile, The Malaysian Insider, in an article published on April 20, reported that Sime Darby is planning to build a Subang Jaya City Centre (SJCC) for its oldest and most popular township, Subang Jaya, as part of an urban renewal effort.

In the report, it is said that skybridges are in the plans for the SJCC to provide easy accessibility to the public into the buildings.

Yeoh said she was not against development but was against unsustainable development. “Until and unless traffic issues can be resolved, I cannot be in favour of any further development here,” she said.

An official from the MPSJ urban planning department said the Ikram study was based on current developments in the area, and that the institute had yet to complete the entire study.

“Since Ikram’s study has to be presented in stages, the results that they showed us did not take into consideration future upgrading of the road and the extension of the LRT services into Subang Jaya.

“By then, the traffic condition should be eased and the situation can be helped if cars are not parked indiscriminately along the roadside.”

He said the commercial status of the stretch of land had been gazetted as such even before MPSJ was established and that approvals of projects had been given around the same time.

Thus, he said, there was no dispute that the area was being converted into a commercial zone.

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