Prasarana to review maintenance of rail services

The government will implement a paradigm shift in terms of the method of maintaining rail transport under the supervision of Prasarana Malaysia Berhad, by focusing more on breakdown prevention measures, says Transport Minister Anthony Loke.

He said the review would, among other things, consider more relevant maintenance and engineering operation times to reduce the risk of trains breaking down and causing service disruptions.

"One of the components in maintenance culture is to have longer engineering hours every day, this is one key component that we will introduce in our line and operation.

"We have to look at these longer hours of engineering, it means we might close the operation a bit earlier, probably half or one hour earlier to have longer maintenance and engineering time, but we will give ample notice to the passengers to adapt to the changes," he said at a press conference held during the Prasarana Group Hari Raya open house in Kuala Lumpur today.

Loke said he was confident that Prasarana would be able to achieve the MKBF target of one million kilometres for the Kelana Jaya line light rail transit (LRT), the Ampang line LRT and the Kajang line mass rapid transit (MRT) as well as 150,000km for the Monorail by the third quarter of 2026.
 
According to him, MKBF is an internationally recognised way of assessing service reliability derived from the average distance a train travels before a failure or breakdown causing a delay of more than five minutes occurs.

He said the MKBF - used by train operators around the world including in Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan - was also part of the main KPI (key performance indicator) and a transparent evaluation method for MRT, LRT and Monorail.

"This report is indeed prepared by Prasarana every month and will be submitted to the ministry, but now this report will be displayed online (through the website and social media) to the public," he said.

He added that the initiative was also seen as a more transparent method to improve the public transport system and that he was open to receiving views from the community and any interested parties who could monitor service performance through the KPI.