Rapid Penang Take Over by State Goverment?

Rapid Penang suffered a loss of RM10.5m in 2009 (The Star). While public transport is a social obligation and should not be viewed as a profit-seeking venture, there is a lot of room for improvement in Rapid Penang, as pointed out in the Auditor General’s report (The Star).

For one thing, effectiveness could be improved if routes were modified and more feeder buses and transit stations implemented. An integrated ticketing system could work wonders.

But I heard that State government would like to offer a bid to takeover the Rapid Penang bus services from the Federal Government. Mismanagement may leads to a loss in operation the said. We had heard much before how the state government have provide many new things to keep up the Rapid Penang bus services better, such as providing a free WiFi connection (in partnership with DiGi) in every bus. Yes you heard me right. A free internet connection in every bus. As a student, I found that this features is really useful and interesting. That's means that  you will always connected to the internet anywhere in Penang (almost, actually).

3 hours of waiting just to open up the Google? Smile.

However, that is just a rumours. Maybe in the next few years they can made a huge profit when the services are widely available across the State of Penang. It is also good to see whether the state government are going to add more interesting features into this Rapid Penang bus services? Only time will tell. On the other half, what is your opinion about this issues? Bad or good? Let's us discuss it here!