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PROSIDING SEMINAR
HARI PERANCANGAN BANDAR SEDUNIA 2010
These sub-centers receive highest priority to get connected with the central business district and among themselves by mass rapid transport schemes, like light rail/MRT and/or bus rapid transit links. Urban planning is just one side of a coin, the other one should be its implementation. Our authorities have a notorious weakness in the latter: Laws, regulations or plans are hardly followed up in their implementation or enforcement. Neither is the traffic police capable to guarantee the discipline of traffic flow, safety and land-use, nor are policies or urban plans, like master-plans, land-useplans and the like being implemented. Instead these are continuously revised and adjusted to the rapid change of reality; instead of being the proactive means of urban development, these plans are degraded to becoming a response and a re-active reflection of an overtaking reality. Planning a complex and fast changing reality is indeed a much more difficult exercise than its application in the rather stagnant “developed world� where plans are meant to initiate change and improvements. The planning process must include its range of implications within the lifespan from its rendering through to its follow-up implementations and enforcement. To succeed in that, urban planning must start from a long term vision which stretches far beyond the expected and unexpected reality change. Such planning then does not merely become the tool to correct the symptoms of the most severe problems a city is facing during the time, but it guides the urban development as a legally binding frame to far reaching objectives by defining the long term visions and the strategies and processes to get there:
Asian towns feature their inner city public space free of fuel driven private means of transport (cars and motorbikes) in order to provide these streets and parks to pedestrians, bicycles and an extensive network of all appropriate modes of public transport . The backbone of public transport in larger cities consists of a network of railbased mass rapid transit lines, partly on ground and partly elevated. Exclusively dedicated bus-rapid-transit lines complement and support this city wide network, where stations are no further than 1 km from any location within the inner city central business district. Feeder buses of smaller scale connect these stations and collective (electric) as well as individual taxis (electric or manpowered) compliment the seamless connections within this hierarchy of urban public transport.