"WHAT'S wrong with your car?"
"Nothing!"
"Are you sure there's nothing wrong with your car?"
"Yes!"
My mother eyes me suspiciously as I slip into my comfortable walking shoes. "It's not safe," she finally says. I heave a sigh of exasperation. It's not like I'm venturing into a war zone. Or going off to fight crime like, well, Batman. I've just decided to take the KTM Komuter train to work. I'm ditching my car to join 20 per cent of the Malaysian workforce in taking the train/public transport to work.
Never mind the fact that the last time I took the train to work was more than five years ago. What can possibly go wrong? Not like it's rocket science. The Teluk Pulai station is a good 10-minute walk away. It'd do me good to get some fresh air, I reason to myself. I'd be getting away from the gridlock and making it to work in good time. "Heck, it'd be an adventure," I think blithely.
After almost three years of working from home, I was surprised to find myself looking forward to the call-back to the office. It felt like a clear signal that things were slowly shifting back to life as it was pre-pandemic. Perhaps now, work and everything else that falls outside that would find themselves slowly being moved in their proper places.
When work and home collapse into one, you lose not only the connection to a wider world, but also the mental signposts that signal a beginning and an end to the day. If you can roll out of bed and already be at the office, work never stops.
Likewise, if you can't close the door on a pile of laundry waiting to be folded, or run errands for the day, it's hard to mentally set aside household duties.
As I swing my backpack over my shoulders, the excitement of "going to work" hits me. The line has been drawn. Home is no longer my "office". Now I had somewhere to head to.
REMOTE OUTPOST
The KTM Komuter has been consistently contributing to the train route map in Malaysia. Established in 1995, the Komuter line provides a convenient rail service throughout Kuala Lumpur and surrounding areas of the Klang Valley. It has grown to become an indispensable part of the public transport system, serving millions of passengers every year.
The Teluk Pulai Komuter station isn't exactly easy to get to, I realise belatedly. The lonely single lane leads to a clearing that looks even more isolated. A rusty flight of stairs at the corner is the only way I can get to the other side where the station is located.
The only other way to get to the station would be to go through the torn fencing, cross the tracks and clamber on the other side. Illegal and with my luck, I might either get caught or trip over the tracks and become well… roadkill — or in this case — trainkill.
This isn't a place that I'd like to be in when it gets dark. You can easily imagine a Michael Myers in a hockey mask lurking behind the pillars and absolutely no one is going to hear you scream when you trip over your legs and end up being sliced by the knife-wielding fiend. I make a mental note to leave the office in time so I don't have to reach the station at sundown.
After wheezing and huffing my way up the stairs, the journey doesn't get better. The pathway is filled with gravel and stones. There are no street lights to illuminate your path at night, and unless you can see in the dark and navigate through the stony pathway without twisting your ankle, it'd be a bad idea to take this particular overhead bridge at night. Another flight of (rusty) stairs down, I'm at the station.
That short walk to the station made me realise just how much improvements are needed to make daily commuting safer for people who are reliant on this service. Surely building proper walkways and ensuring that all stations and their surroundings are well-lit, especially at night, are essential planning if we want to achieve 50 per cent urban public transport use by 2040 as part of the Low-Carbon Aspiration 2040 plan.
To make public transport an attractive and everyday choice for residents, cities must design the service well, and overcome physical and cultural barriers — particularly after the disruption of Covid-19. High-quality public transport services are reliable, frequent, fast, comfortable, accessible, convenient, affordable and safe, serving routes for which there's demand.
If you want to attract more people into using public transportation, you might want to make the stations easy to get to, safer to use during non-peak hours, and see that the walkways and overhead pedestrian bridges leading to the station are given an overhaul from time to time. If this is what I have to face on a daily basis, chances are my mother is right — I'm headed to a war zone every time I take the train to work!
HERE COMES THE TRAIN
The Komuter train comes gliding by on time. It's time to sit, stare at the cracked glass on the window pane (Oh, KTM, can you at least replace the window panes, ah?) or people-watch. This is honestly one of the best parts of the commute.
Sure, there are better ways to socialise than to squeeze against strangers on a crowded train, but the daily experience puts you in the thick of the city's rhythm and provides uninterrupted time to people-watch, one of the little pleasures of living in a crowded metropolis. Lose that experience, and you may feel adrift at home.
This hour I spend on the train gives me a respite from calls and other interruptions, with little to do but be in the moment. When else can you listen to a podcast from end to end, or get through a few chapters of a book you've been longing to read, in one sitting?
I finally reach my destination and proceed to take a slow walk to my office. Of course, I can't take in a deep breath of fresh air without inhaling the belch of exhaust smoke from whizzing vehicles on the main road. But still, it's a nice walk and the sky overhead is blue. I make it to the office in good time. It's a great day to get back to the grind.
But I look forward to the end of my work day when I take the same route and catch the train back to that Teluk Pulai station. The sun is still up when I clamber up those rusty steps, walk through that gravelly path and take another rusty flight of stairs down to that lonely clearing. It's still bright — perhaps too bright for any knife-wielding fiend to be lurking anywhere nearby.
The walk home is uneventful but the best part is, of course, the hard break between work and home that a commute provides — the "Honey, I'm home!" moment (in my case, it's "Mum, I'm home!").
Tomorrow is another day. I think I'll take the train again. It's worth braving the war zone and Michael Myers combined.