In July, answering a parliamentary question from Rushdan Rusmi of Padang Besar, Transport Minister Anthony Loke explained why public transport projects need government money.
The answer was more honest than these answers usually are.
1. The sentence
"The government controls the fare. We regulate fares to ensure these services remain affordable for the people."
And therefore, in Loke's words, "these projects become less commercially viable for the private sector because investors need a return."
That's it. That's the whole thing. You cannot simultaneously cap the price of a service and expect private capital to build it at scale. Someone has to eat the difference, and it's either the passenger or the treasury.
2. Why the highway comparison lands
Loke drew the contrast himself, and it's the sharpest part of his answer.
Toll highways in Malaysia are privately financed and they work commercially, because toll rates are set contractually. The concessionaire knows what it can charge and for how long. It can model a return.
Public transport fares are regulated by APAD and can't be freely raised. So the same investor looking at the same country sees a bankable proposition in a highway and an unbankable one in a rail line.
Malaysia then spent decades wondering why it got so many highways.
That's not an accident of culture or car ownership. It's a direct output of how the two things are financed. We built the thing the finance model would build.
3. Which projects this is about
Loke named three: the East Coast Rail Link, Penang LRT, and the E-ART project in Johor Baru.
All three are large, all three are in states that have waited a long time, and none of them will pay for themselves at a regulated fare. That's not a failure. It's what public transport is.
4. The framing problem
Rail projects in this country get judged on whether they turn a profit. Highways don't get judged that way, because the toll makes the accounting look clean while the externalities go somewhere else.
Nobody prices the congestion. Nobody prices the road deaths. Nobody prices the land given over to parking in every city centre, or what a four-lane arterial does to the shophouse street it replaced.
A rail line that "loses money" and takes 100,000 cars off the road every day is not losing money. It's moving the cost somewhere it doesn't get counted.
5. Where fares actually sit
Rapid KL adjusted travel pass prices from 1 January 2026. New monthly rail passes for KLIA, Putrajaya and Cyberjaya came in around May. In Selangor there's a demand-responsive transit subsidy scheme running.
So fares are moving, subsidies are moving, and the underlying tension Loke described hasn't changed at all. It just gets renegotiated every budget cycle.
6. What to watch
Budget 2027 on 9 October. Loke's answer is effectively an argument for sustained operating subsidy rather than one-off capital grants, and those are very different line items.
Capital funding builds a line. Operating subsidy is what keeps the fare low enough for anyone to ride it. Malaysia has historically been better at the first than the second, which is how you end up with good infrastructure and mediocre ridership.
Watch which one shows up.
Source: Govt funding crucial to keep public transport fares affordable, says Loke, New Straits Times, 2 July 2026.