Ara Damansara

Users of the Tropicana link are generally an impatient lot. More so if they are heading towards Bandar Utama. There is a U turn near Menara Lien Hoe but it’s a few hundred metres away. During peak hours, the queue is long and a ten to fifteen minutes wait is not unusual. Sometimes, extra cautious drivers made things worst as they will make the turn only when the road is empty. If they see the shadow of a car which is still many seconds away, they will wait. And they will move the car only after the car has long passed. All it takes is just a handful of such drivers and you have the compound effect of seconds running into minutes.

The extra distance and the long waiting time has thus enticed many drivers to take a short cut at the T-junction near the Tropicana main entrance. They know it’s illegal but the advantage is hard to resist. Occasionally, they do find themselves caught as they are waved down just before the tunnel. Our man in uniform are smart and when they see an opportunity to enforce the law, they do.

Another reason users are reluctant to use the U turn is the timing of the traffic lights. At a T-junction, there are three group of road users and the lights will change in a round robin fashion. Common sense will tell us that the largest group of users should be given a bigger allocation. This is to ensure there is no bottleneck. For some reasons, this is not the case here and one group of users seems to be given more time than required. This has created a problem at this junction when two group of users are always kept waiting when there is hardly any traffic for the 3rd group of users. During peak hours, a very long queue can be seen stretching more than half a kilometer away and complaints to MBPJ seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

One community staying near by has been asking for a right turn so that users of the Tropicana link at the end of this road can make a right turn towards the tunnel. We were told there were resistance from another influential community in the area and thus the request has been gathering dust in the MBPJ office. Several months ago, the request was made again in a meeting with the local councillor and MBPJ and MBPJ’s engineering department has confirmed there is no technical reasons why the request should be turned down.

Persistence finally pays off and the request has now been granted. Work has started a few weeks ago and it is almost ready just waiting for the road to be re-surfaced and the traffic lights re-calibrated. It should be ready in a few weeks time, hopefully before the Chinese New Year.

We hope the re-calibration will be done fairly so that all road users have their fair share of time based on traffic volumes. In addition, we hope MBPJ will also re-calibrate the two traffic lights further down the road heading towards Kota Damansara. They are causing unnecessary stoppages as there is hardly any traffic exiting from the neighbourhood.