Things are becoming murkier than the waters near the berthing area of the Raja Tun Uda ferry terminal in George Town. Is the ferry service as we know it ending on Dec 31 or not?
Yes, said Penang Port Sdn Bhd (PPSB), which takes over ferry operations from Prasarana. It has already put out posters that say the service will run from 6.30am to 11.30am daily, and that there will be no more vehicular ferries.
If you are a pedestrian and need to hop over to the other side past midnight in an emergency, forget about it. The days of 24-hour ferry services are long gone.
The fares remain the same, even with the fast boats: RM1.20 for adults and 60 sen for children and the disabled. All cross-channel services from the island will now be at the Swettenham Pier cruise terminal.
That’s what PPSB said.
The finance minister had a different take. He told the Dewan Rakyat that the “iconic ferry service” would carry on.
That has got everyone in knots, and not the kind in which the speed of boats is measured.
Did he say the iconic ferry “service” will continue or did he mean the “iconic ferries” will continue to be in service? I am told that the finance minister got it wrong and that, whether Penangites like it or not, the days of an enjoyable and slow ride across the channel on the old boats are over.
The fact that former Penang chief minister Lim Guan Eng is trying, in vain so far, to pin Transport Minister Wee Ka Siong into confirming the finance minister’s promise, is clear evidence that the change is inevitable.
It really was a ride to savour, the sea breeze hitting your face, watching jellyfish floating lazily by and counting the container ships as they moved ever so slowly across.
In its place, there will be a claustrophobic ride in speedboats, at least for the next 18 months when the supposedly “more comfortable” water buses come along.
Penangites will miss the old ferries very much. It has always been a part of their lives, an unchanging feature in a fast-changing world.
The ferry service was started in 1894 by former Penang Free School boy Quah Beng Kee and his brothers, but the all-too-familiar vessels that we know today only started plying the channel somewhere around 1957 with the m.v. Pulau Pinang as the first of its class.
During its heyday, the terminals were always busy with a ferry coming in or leaving at all times, round-the-clock. These days, though, it’s usually a long wait and, only recently, the service became non-existent for a whole day.
The ferry ride as a link between island and mainland has indeed become a tenuous one, as tenuous as the relationship between all those involved.
On the one hand, there is Prasarana, a federal government-owned infrastructure entity that owns the ferry boats. On the other is PPSB, the company charged with running the port. The two don’t seem to like working with each other.
To make matters worse, there is the Penang state government which wants to keep the iconic ferry boats in service but with water taxis and other things thrown in. And neither of the first two are working with the state government.
You could call it a case of too many cooks spoiling the sloop, except that these boats are far bigger than sloops.
Call it wishful thinking but I would like to see the three get together and keep the current ferry boats in service, at least for tourists and the Penang diaspora. They could also have speedboats for those in a hurry, and charge different rates for the two services.
The question of cost seems almost moot. After all, PPSB wants to spend RM35,000 a month to lease pontoons just to berth vessels from a Langkawi-based company until the water buses come along in July 2022. More money will be needed to lease those vessels in the first place. A lot of money will be forked out.
Nothing good is going to come out of this, I believe.
For one, it’s going to be a nightmare for motorcyclists. PPSB is going to keep one old ferry boat running for them but think about this: if you miss the boat, you will have to wait an hour, at least. That’s how long it will take for that lone ferry boat to get to the other side and back.
No thinking motorcyclist is going to wait. Instead, they will flood the bridge (or bridges).
Which brings us to another problem. The bridge is really no place for older motorcyclists, especially those on smaller kapcais, and at night. Strong crosswinds and heavy traffic can lead to accidents, which then lead to nightmarish jams.
The motorists, too, are going to have it bad. With thousands more motorcyclists now on the bridge, traffic is going to be reduced to a crawl, unless a dedicated bike lane is set up in a hurry on the first bridge too.
As things are, bikes weave into the main lane and small cars overtake on the emergency lane which doubles up as the bike lane.
Things are already terrible enough every weekend when the Mat Rempits bring their races from the mainland, through the newer bridge, on to various parts of the island and back to the mainland via the older bridge.
Finally, of course, there’s the question of what is going to happen to the huge swathes of land that will become available on both sides of the state?
Obviously, not much space will be needed for foot passengers and motorcyclists to get on the new water buses.
Those large areas where hundreds of cars used to drive in and wait for ferries will be sea-fronting land banks. I see a small fortune there. And smell a rat, too.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.