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QUESTION TIME | Just the other day, during the long Thaipusam weekend, we took a drive to the East Coast, specifically Terengganu. The laid-back atmosphere, the still unspoilt beaches, clear blue skies and the unseasonably good weather for this time of the year lured us back to this resort we like.

And the roads, yes the roads. It’s easily possible to make it there from Kuala Lumpur in about three-and-a-half hours driving at a leisurely pace - make it four hours with a short break for coffee. Did not use to be like that though - a good seven to eight hours before.

The difference was the new highway from Karak, not long after the Genting turn off if you are heading east from Kuala Lumpur, that leads all the way to Kuala Terengganu. On the day that we drove up, it was all but deserted - on a Saturday with a long weekend ahead. When we returned on a Monday, despite it being a public holiday on the West Coast, traffic was easy all the way to Kuala Lumpur.

Our major complaint was a poor Temerloh stop along the East Coast Expressway - that’s what it is called - for a short break before resuming our journey. Food was very limited, it was crowded and there were flies in abundance landing on all the uncovered food. Unappetising, to say the least, but the roads were clear.

With the main thoroughfare between Klang Valley and the East Coast cities showing such lack of traffic 15 years after the Karak-Kuantan section was completed back in 2004, what is the pressing need to build the very expensive East Coast Rail Link or ECRL that is to cover pretty much the same towns?

Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad himself now expects the ECRL project to cost more than a massive RM100 billion. That could well work out to be the case as I explained in an earlier article.

Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng had earlier put the revised cost up from RM55 billion by the previous regime to RM81 billion, including interest costs and other expenses. Costs will be high - very high - whichever way we look at it. Even RM55 billion is not an amount to be sniffed at and it is likely to be much more than even that.

The ECRL is already a rather controversial project because reports have it that even the original price of RM55 billion was already some RM20 billion over the usual price. The reports further continue that, together with another China pipeline project to nowhere of some RM10 billion, it would have provided in all some RM30 billion to the Najib Abdul Razak regime, enough to close off that RM30 billion huge gaping hole in strategic development company gone wrong, 1MDB...

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