London Public transportation - A model of efficiency

What I love about London beside its theatres, museums and city parks is its seamless public transportation. Buses and tubes (underground rail) and regular trains seem to travel in tandem. You hop on one and off another and plan your destination earlier. You use only one card usually you pay in advance.

If you were to take the tube based on a daily rate you have to pay GBP1.20 per trip. So if you want to go to a destination, you have to make sure that it can be connected to the line you are travelling. Once you alight and go out of the station and then coming back to go to another station, you have to pay for another ticket. One week season ticket enable you to hop on and off any transport without having to pay for each trip. A great way for tourists to travel around London.

We had a pleasant surprise when the cost of travel to areas outside London is deducted according to zone, from the season ticket. We went shopping and sightseeing in Portsmouth and visiting friends in Wellyn Garden City about 2-2 1/2 hours from London Waterloo and King's Cross respectively. But you need to tell the ticket seller about your week season ticket otherwise he will charge you the full fare going out of London.

The bus in London is also numerous and run according to schedule. It is good to travel by bus as the route is sometimes direct rather than by tube in which you need to change line to arrive at your destination. When I was on a fellowship in London some years ago I mostly travelled by tube so I hardly saw the London scene such as the river Thames, bridges, iconic buildings such as Westminster, St Paul Cathedral etc. Some of the bus routes are really scenic. Of course you need to know which bus to go where and which is nearer to your place of stay.

Visionary planning is required to reach the level of such efficient transportation where not only the poor can travel on it but the middle class as well. I used to see my clinical professor travel to London on the tube every day. She parked her car at the train station nearest to her home in outer London and travel all the way by public transport.

In Kuala Lumpur it looks like only those without own cars travel on public transport which is still insufficient in numbers and is not run efficiently as well. There is no seamless ticket system yet except for touch n go for LRT . I am wondering why despite being independent for more than half a century we have not really bothered to raise the standard of public transportation to the level seen in countries like England. We are at the mercy of some unscrupulous taxi drivers who fail to see the big picture when they fleece especially the tourists.

When I went to London at Christmas 2008, I saw several top government servants who took their families on a holiday there and these are the people who advise the government on policy and planning. There are of course those Ministers and Deputy Ministers and their families and friends who have been going to London all these years. Don't they notice how good London public transportation is? Unless of course when they are there they are all chauffeur driven.