JUNE 18 — I stay in Petaling Jaya and work in Kuala Lumpur.  Even though my house is about 20 minutes’ walk from the nearest LRT station, I take the LRT to work, changing trains at the Masjid Jamek Station.

Taking the LRT during rush hour is no fun at all. You are squeezed like sardines, male and female alike, in a coach that smells of stale air. It is in fact downright unhygienic since if someone with flu sneezes in the coach, most of the passengers will probably be infected. It is also very scary for the women, because even if you feel someone groping you, you can’t budge to avoid and fend off the move.

That is why most days I still drive, since the third option of taking a bus is totally out of the question, as a bus trip will takes hours to reach my work place.

So in KL and most other urban centres in Malaysia, a car is considered a necessity, never mind that owning a car may contribute to green house gas emissions and pollute the atmosphere.

Malaysians simply have no other choice. In KL, without a car, you are like a person without legs. The LRT serves only limited areas and taking the bus is often too time-consuming and may entail two or three bus changes.

Taking the taxi is an option that cannot be exercised on a daily basis, since it is simply too costly to do so. I would not even advise you to ride a bicycle — though I would prefer personally to ride one if there were less traffic and less killer-driver types on the roads — since by doing so, the probability of you landing in a morgue or hospital ICU is so high

So the car is a necessity. But car prices are so high that for those who are just starting work, the loan instalments can be a big portion of their take-home pay.

Malaysian car prices are many times that of many other countries. For example, a Toyota Camry 2.4 in Malaysia is about RM170,000 but the same car is selling for about RM69,000 in the US. A Honda Jazz is about RM108,000 in Malaysia but costs only RM36,000 in Indonesia. Many models of cars in Malaysia which are selling at six figures can be bought for below RM50,000 in many other countries.

We Malaysians of all racial background are paying so much higher for our cars, it is like most of us are working just to pay for our cars. We are also earning to pay for something that will help clog up our roads, so that we have no choice but spend hours behind the wheel stuck in jams everyday and everywhere we go.

This is money that we can and should save for our children’s education, our healthcare, our old age, or to purchase a roof over our heads, but we have to spend it on cars, since our public transport is so inefficient that owning a car is now a necessity.

When public transport is efficient, like in London, few people actually drive. Most will take the Underground, and they have so many criss-crossing lines that in fact everywhere within the city is reachable by the “Tube”.

But in Malaysia, what other choice do we have except to sit behind the wheel and get used to spending most of our evening hours in the unproductive pursuit of keeping other equally hapless drivers company?

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.