It looks like the KL-Singapore high-speed rail (HSR) is on track, as a new company, MyHSR Corp, is going to be spearheading the project towards its completion according to a report on The Star. Mohd Nur Ismail Mohamed Kamal, formerly with the Land Public Transport Commission (SPAD), recently took over MyHSR.
Mohd Nur expects the pre-qualification for the HSR tender to go live by the middle of 2016, and the second stage towards the later part of 2016. MyHSR will be evaluating the overall life-cycle cost of the system to get the best value possible. He said the company will be the project owner and developer of the project, and SPAD as the policymaker and regulator and continue the active bilateral engagement with Singapore.
“Five work streams” have been identified to set up the HSR. Firstly, there will be G-to-G (government-to-government) support for SPAD to finalise technical, commercial and bilateral agreements with Singapore. The joint minister’s committee (JMC) under Datuk Seri Abdul Wahid Omar will tackle issues such as safety, security, customs, immigration and alignment of stations with Singaporean authorities.
For example, the CIQ (Customs, Immigration and Quarantine complex) is going to be a co-location, and that Singapore and Malaysia will have immigration counters in Kuala Lumpur, Nusajaya and Singapore. Secondly, there will be the finalisation of stations and alignment, with detailed environmental impact assessment, social impact assessment, soil investigation and land acquisition.
Thirdly, preparation for the tender process, which is still being finalised, will depend on the final operating structure agreed by the Malaysian and Singaporean governments. The fourth stream will concentrate on socioeconomic development opportunities to maximise benefits of HSR services and stations along the corridor. Mohd Nur said for a 5 km radius outside stations like Ayer Keroh, Muar, Batu Pahat and Nusajaya, the company will looking at broader policies on how to develop these zones.
The fifth facet will be about engagement; to convince Malaysians to see the benefits not only from a transport perspective but in line with economic development. Furthermore, Mohd Nur said there are plans create a HSR Act, to not only cover KL-SG lines but perhaps eastern or northern HSR lines in the future. He said this will help in future HSR implementations.
As we reported earlier, the KL-Singapore HSR will run along the same route as KTM’s double-tracking project in the peninsular, but there will be no duplicates or redundancy. It should also be noted that companies from Japan, France and China have already expressed their interest in this HSR project.
Bashers will be bashing this project to kingdom come because the head of MyHSR is Mohd Nur Ismail. But if the head of this venture is an ultra-kiasu who can’t even speak BM properly, suddenly this project will be hailed as the best in Asia
Because it is proven all this while. Just compare the economy of ultra-kiasu Singapore and Tak-apa MalaYsia.
Btw, do you speak BM with oversea’s HSR technical team? or is the tender in BM? or is the Bangla who are going to build the railroad speak propoer BM?
Congratulations for totally missing the point. Are you an ultra-kiasu race chauvinist as well?
Then let kiasu ppl become the head and see how, I dare you. Now you see who is actually the real kiasu ppl!
How could u have this kind of perception? If u didnt start the 1st post with a racial tone, bet that this argument wouldn’t have arisen in this automobile portal.
why is there 3 stops at johor alone….???
muar – batu pahat, distance is quite near..
you said high speed singapore to kl railway…
then next yer tambah lagi machap,yong peng,kulai,alor gajah,kajang…
check back your planning Myhsr….
If stop so many stations, how come the train can archive maximum speed? It will call Average Speed Rail .
Lor…Think first lor.
Just cancel this project. Not much benefit to the odinary rakyat, only benefit developers & few people pocket. It would be good if gov focus on the current old tracks & connect with new route.
Spot on. How many people actually needs to urgently go to singapore or commute daily from kl to singapore? There are already good connectivity to singapore by air (mas, sia, airasia, tigerair, jetstar, etc), by roads (causeway n underutillized secondlink), buses, KTM, taxi, limos, upcoming RTS n etc.
Since the RM is now down more than 20% compared to USD, so it is possible that the cost of the project will increase around the same figure too from estimated 40b to probably close to 50b.
Rather than spending this huge money on this PEMANDU elistist project, it is much more beneficial to the ordinary rakyat if is use to upgrade the east cost rail to electrified double track instead. It will enhanced the connectivity (still no highway to kelantan, limited flights) and open up new areas of growth along the central peninsular. ETS shall cut the traveling time to east coast to less than half. Cargo train can haul goodies from the east to KL n vice versa.
Spot on? For those who are working in dead-end jobs with crappy local companies, how often do you guys travel anyway? Obviously the lower-income lowly-skilled working class do not see the benefit in this.
But for higher-achievers that run fund management companies out of Singapore due to their tax treatise with more countries in the world than the Cayman Islands, being based in Malaysia while being able to shuttle back and forth to Singapore safely and quickly with less hassle than air travel is a boon.
And this will be the target crowd that the HSR will benefit, not people who don’t even travel by bus to Singapore twice a year, much less take a flight there.
Obviously not high enough. High achievers would be shuttling KL singapore via private jet with vip immigration clearance. The wannabes would probably want the hsr as it would make them look more caucasian. Ideally yes hsr would be a great addition, a showpiece to malaysian infrastructure. But since it will funded by the gov, the money is better off somewhere else. Unless u want to be like india, fancy space programs, nukes, military assets n yet millions of people still live in poverty.
Since u run fund management companies, why not u raised the fund for hsr yourself? 100% privately funded hsr. That would be high achievement.
now i can go to my hometown faster as HSR will stop at my hometown…
No project money, no pocket money
Connect old routes and old towns.. to accomplish what, exactly?
Will there be new oil fields? New industrial zones? Our existing industrial zones already have a glut of built-up spaces. There are far more factory lots available than what the industry needs. Our manufacturing sector’s human capital is dominated by foreigners anyway, so this couldn’t possibly benefit the local economy.
More than 80% of Malaysia’s economy is commodity-based and highly volatile to external pressures. How will connecting the rural areas to KL help with the development of the country? In contrast, 80% of Singapore’s economy is based on intellectual property and professional services..a true knowledge-based economy, unlike Malaysia. And hence, there’s a big potential for a spillover effect with Malaysians and Singaporeans extending K-economy tie-ups through improved transportation and information networks.
That is how it becomes of strategic importance over the years. Emotional arguments about how there’s no benefit to “ordinary folks” and how it’s better to provide better connectivity to rural Malaysia simply will not improve the country at all in the long run.
That’s the problem with Malaysia. The majority of the population are small-minded short-sighted folks who fail to understand macro-economics and long-term strategic developments. That’s why Malaysians are no better than people in India, Cambodia, Myanmar, etc who only live day-by-day reacting to what happens to them, but with no ability to plan ahead and see the big pictures
Need to connect East Coast to KL directly … no need go to Gemas!
It is actually possible to skip gemas. To tunnel thru the titiwangsa east of kl would probably cost a fortune since it would be a 20-30km of tunneling job. However, it is better to tunnel thru the titiwangsa via kuala pilah as only 2-5km tunneling will be needed. This route will go straight from seremban to bahau instead of seremban-tampin-gemas-bahau. it will shave off another 90km or 1 hr from the eastcoast route. No major stations will be abandon since tampin and gemas still serving the southern route. Another major station in kuala pilah can also be built to add the capacity.
Tunneling through the Titiwangsa range for 5km.. that would be something!
Good thing that we already have the experience from the SMART Tunnel and the MRT project.. the Germans have been assisting us with state-of-the-art tunneling technology, I think we’ll be able to do it within another decade.
With the increasing jams and fatalities on highways yearly, this is certainly a welcome solution, in my opinion. I would rather take a HSR than drive down to JB or Singapore any day.
The only questions is how much and how fast?
For us that do business in Singapore, it’s a moot point of how fast and what’s the price. As long as they have a more regular schedule to Singapore than the airlines, with less hassle at passing through CIQ, it will be of great benefit.
The HSR is mainly for people who do business in Singapore or Malaysians who have companies in Singapore. It is not a cheap substitute for buses and regular trains. It is not a charity project to provide cheap transport for low-income earners to go to Singapore (does that even make sense at all??), so people should just stop bitching about “How will this benefit the rakyat” and “Can the tickets be cheap” and other such nonsensical questions.
hmm…another GLC project?please, this will lead to 1MDB case again, another Malaysians’ money dumpster into the black hole….
Not just GLC, as far as I’m concerned Proton is no longer a GLC, but that doesn’t stop the old man from begging money from the government.
No one is surprise it’s a GLC project, and no surprise too when the project is delayed, highly over budget and plague with signalling, infrastructure and expensive problems.
Just look at projects by GLC, got eyes to see?
So, I suppose Sunway’s BRT project is a model of a successful private-sector venture? With the exorbitant construction cost, limited ridership and insane ticket prices, with no hope of seeing ROI for another 50 years at this rate?
And the line is run by sunway or prasarana? The venture is 70 percent owned by prasarana which is a GLC aka mommy’s boy company.
By the time this project completed, the exchange rate might be S$1.00 to RM10.00!
The exchange rate will get worse thanks to the steadily increasing stupidity of Malaysians and the overall decline of our human capital. By the time it’s completed, Malaysia might as well build ferry terminals at the straits of Malacca and South China Sea because Malaysians are only qualified to be domestic maids and construction workers in Indonesia and Philippines by then.
They have a lot of nerve to say the train will be faster then then flying. When you check the flowchart for the process and the time taken, how sure are you the immigration at the HSR will be 15mins as opposed to the 60mins for flight? Sugar coating at its finest.
He might have taken into account the you-need-to-be-at-airport-2-hours-before-international-flight criteria
I go to Singapore a few times a month by flight and by driving. That’s a simple enough comparison of the CIQ processes by road and by air. 15 minutes CIQ clearance by rail is definitely possible.
My hubby so clever!!!!
The 1st slide “GNI per capita to raise beyond RM48,000 or USD 15,000”
Correction: USD15,000 is worth RM66,000 as of today.
We who live in Muar and Batu Pahat see the HSR as a godsend. Being UMNO strongholds we were left to rot by UMNO while KL-Seremban prospered. The NSE alignment even bypassed Batu Pahat. Moreover, the upgrade for the NSE from 2 to 3 lanes stops at the Melaka-Johor border. Even the last 20km into Johor Bahru is still not upgraded. To those who do not want the HSR, please stay away.