Cities of the future - KL not one of them

Aren't we envious of the people of China whose government (despite being Communist and perhaps with a poor human rights record) is doing everything it can not only to spur economic growth but to make the everyday life of its citizens as easy as possible?

Of course, I am talking about China's new bullet train which can travel 394.2 kph, the fastest in the world, faster than Japan's bullet train (243 kph) and France's (277) kph. The result of which the Chinese can travel fast from Guangzhou - the business hub in southern China near Hong Kong - to Wuhan in the north.

And not so long ago, China also completed its long railway line from Shanghai to Tibet during which some parts of the journey when the air is thinner, passengers would have to wear oxygen masks.

Now that's what I call progress.

Now, what do we have in Malaysia? After 50 years, we have no shame in boasting about our highways, Petronas Twin Towers (which to me look like the Cathedral in Barcelona), the stupid twin-terminal KLIA, the ugly elevated expressways, this and that.

When it comes to public transport, everything is done a bit here and a bit there and in the end our citizens are still wasting a lot of time and spending a lot of money commuting to work especially our female workers who often sleep on the cramped buses.

The former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad has to answer a lot for this negligence. He naively thought Malaysia could be another US where everything revolves around cars. Surely enough, cars have now taken over our lives.

Since our roads and space are never enough for the ever-growing number of cars, we have now become more agitated, stressed and suicidal. The only wage-earners who are slightly happier are those who live in other cities outside Kuala Lumpur and leave their families and cars at home during the week and travel by express buses to work in Kuala Lumpur.

We all know that the elevated expressways which grew like spaghetti in some parts of Kuala Lumpur have unavoidably become part of a developed country like Malaysia.

But do we know that the city fathers of Boston in the US have just realised that elevated expressways are a scourge of modern public life because they divide cities and communities. They have just decided to pull them down and replace them with underground roads.

So too the city fathers of Seoul, South Korea who recently decided to tear down a boulevard running right across the city in order to restore a beautiful river running right beneath the boulevard.

Now, do we think that our leaders could see the point? Not in a million years.