On 21 February 2022, a photo of congestion at RFID lanes in Jalan Duta heading towards Kuala Lumpur went viral on Twitter with the caption “Perfect picture of how inefficient RFID lanes are.”
And like any companies who would proceed to do damage control only after their bad sides went viral, Plus Malaysia Bhd. proceeded to conduct an investigation to identify the cause of the long queues and reported on their social media that the congestions happened due to some drivers attempting to reload their Touch ‘n Go eWallet at the RFID lanes during peak hours of between 8 AM to 8.59 AM.
Although the company did apologize for the inconvenience caused, it’s such a classic move to point fingers at their consumers without looking at the real issue at hand. For example, despite their continued effort to promote users to change from a Touch ‘n Go card or SmartTag to RFID, they’ve only had 1 to 2 RFID lanes on most of the tolls.
This is not the first time that Plus has faced such a backlash. If you’re an RFID user, I’m sure you’ve faced multiple times where your RFID tag remain undetectable and was forced to switch from an RFID lane to a Touch ‘n Go card lane or a SmartTag lane. Not only that it’s dangerous for us to switch lanes due to their detection problem, but it also causes a lot of inconvenience for people who’re rushing.
Thinking back, the initial idea of RFID is to provide a faster drive-through rate through their tolls. But, as we can see from their recent implementation, the RFID tag causes more problems than convenience for us users.
Previously, Plus announced plans to gradually implement a full RFID toll transaction system starting from 15th January, beginning from the North-South Expressway route from Juru toll plaza in Penang to Skudai toll Plaza in Johor. However, should such a large-scale project be implemented when Plus themselves had yet to solve the real problems regarding the RFID found from their small pilot project?
Personally, I’m not in full disagreement with the idea of only an RFID lane, but as far as the current situation goes, I’m not in favour of the current direction they’re heading.
What about you? What is your take on the whole situation? Should RFID be fully implemented on all toll lanes? Should the whole project be dropped? Or should they have a balanced mix of all Touch ‘n Go card lanes, SmartTag lanes, and RFID lanes? Comment to let us know!
Lee Jasen is a content writer under Headliner by Newswav, a programme where content creators get to tell their unique stories through articles and at the same time monetize their content within the Newswav app.
Register at headliner.newswav.com to become one of our content writers now!
Newswav is solely an aggregation platform and hosts the content. The views expressed and content above including media (pictures, videos, etc) were provided by the author. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact Newswav.
