MARCH 27 —Picture this.
It is 7am on the NKVE, and a Myvi moves into the RFID lane, its driver clutching a tag that’s supposed to whisper sweet nothings to the RFID reader so the barrier opens.
Silence.
The barrier stays down.
The Myvi reverses in sheer embarrassment.
Behind, half a dozen drivers curse that front car before grudgingly reversing and secretly wishing they had picked another lane.
How many times have you seen this?
For me it’s about once a day (and I just saw it about two hours before banging out the first paragraph to this article).
I mean, it’s 2025, isn’t it?
We’ve got robots in kopitiams bringing you your teh tarik, but we still can’t avoid toll-booth congestions caused by the silliest reasons.
It’s bad enough the highway is choked up daily but here we find additional bottle-necks because either the driver has insufficient e-wallet balance or his RFID scanner screwed up or the system at the booth can’t detect that particular car.
Ergo, dozens of cars will be required to go into Reverse on the road thus causing or aggravating a traffic jam!
I’m just waiting for that TikTok video consisting of drive expression shots from reverse cameras at every toll.
Our roads are already congested from too many cars, too few roads, and drivers who treat traffic lights as optional decor.
Enter RFID, introduced by PLUS Malaysia and Touch ‘n Go in 2018, promising a future where tolls would practically vanish into a cashless, queueless utopia.
Fast forward (pun intended) 2025, with 12 new RFID lanes added to the North-South Expressway in 2023 we should’ve been zooming past tolls; instead we’re perfecting the art of reversing at 2kph while praying the car behind doesn’t ram us.
Congestion solved? Hell, no.
Meanwhile, Singapore’s ERP system laughs at us.
Solutions? Yeah some have said that we need to educate the public on reloading their e-wallet balances, or raise the number of RFID lanes at tolls or ensure RFID readers are adequately maintained and always functioning.
I’m genuinely curious as to why the highway authorities don’t simply remove the RFID lanes, make every toll booth TNG and Debit card payable.
Wouldn’t this solve, uh, 80 per cent of the problem?
Because whoever didn’t top up their TnG can use their Debit card instead. What are the chances of a driver messing up on both options?
Another alternative is for the RFID payment apps to have some hyper-annoying alarm each time the balance falls below RM6 (not unlike in some cars when people don’t put on their seatbelts).
Failing all this, oh well.
Let’s just continue the awkward toll-booth reversings.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
