KUALA LUMPUR – Prasarana Malaysia Bhd recorded a 60% decrease in reported failures involving all its rail lines last year while nearly all issues with its facilities have been addressed.
According to Prasarana’s 2023 performance report and 2024 plan presentation, which was attended by Transport Minister Anthony Loke today, the KL Monorail line saw the most drastic decline in reported failures.
A failure, according to Loke, is characterised as a technical disruption or conditional error leading to the train’s halt for more than five minutes.
In 2022, the monorail line experienced failures 78 times, with Loke noting that difficulties were reported “nearly every week” that year. However, in 2023, the number improved by 91% to a mere seven cases.
Meanwhile, the Ampang LRT line saw a similarly impressive reduction in failures, recording a 76% decrease in cases, from 79 in 2022 to only 19 the following year.
For the Kelana Jaya LRT line, the busiest in the Klang Valley, a 27% improvement was recorded after 36 failures were noted last year compared to 49 cases in 2022 while the Kajang MRT line’s failures dropped from 46 to 38.
The report also said that all four rail lines were expected to see an overall decrease of 35% in failures for this year.
Besides that, Prasarana said that it was targeting for its facilities – including lifts, escalators and toilets at its public transport stations – to be fully accessible by the third quarter of 2024.
Noting that it was aiming for service recovery measures to take just three days, the report used data obtained from June 9, 2022 as its baseline to measure improvements in Prasarana facilities up to December 31, 2023.
As of the latter date, Prasarana said that 98.1% (319 units) of its lifts were available while the figure stood at 99.5% (656 units) for its escalators.
The issue of broken or unusable lifts and escalators has been a constant issue among public transport users, with some lamenting the slow pace to address such difficulties. – January 9, 2024