Discussion Papers

Public transport in Greater KL is often “good enough”, but easily set aside. GKLMOB Phase 1 examines the everyday frictions behind this fragility.

This paper evaluates bus performance across Greater KL, highlighting reliability issues, operational constraints and opportunities for service improvement.

Public transport in Greater Kuala Lumpur is not failing outright. In fact, many commuters describe it as usable, functional, and sometimes even preferable to driving. Yet small, everyday breakdowns in reliability, access, and provision of information mean that it is also fragile. When things go wrong, even briefly, commuters are pressured to default back to private vehicles. Greater KL’s public transport problem is not failure, but fragility. These insights emerge from Phase 1 of the Greater Kuala Lumpur Mobilities (GKLMOB) study, a multi-method research programme examining how people experience public transport in their daily lives. Phase 1 brings together qualitative interviews, operational performance analysis, and spatial assessment to understand why ridership growth remains uneven despite significant public investment in transport infrastructure. Rather than focusing on attitudes or preferences, the study examines how the public transport system performs in practice, and how commuters respond to that performance.

This discussion paper is part of KRI’s Gender and Care Work research series. It examines how unpaid care labour has been increasingly reframed in Malaysia’s policy discourse, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic