If we are serious about promoting public transport, then we need to think of new solutions that can transform what we already have. One way is to remake bus stops into transit hubs.
Traditional urban settlements such as George Town are compact and tightly organised. Buildings cluster together in all forms. Hard spaces alternate with soft ones as non-physical extensions where the public realm merges seamlessly with the private zones.
In comparison, modernist urban designs obsessively applied simplistic spatial hierarchies. Notions of low densities and zone separations came to fracture neighbourhoods; the worst effect of modernism was the severance of living space from history and tradition.
Malaysian cities in the late 1970s and 1980s underwent massive change in the scale of built environment and highway construction. Engineers and town planners successfully created townships with great commercial vitality and high levels of motor vehicle accessibility. Typical of these is Penang’s Bayan Baru township.
