Malaysia built enough roads to circle the Earth. So why are we still stuck in traffic?
Here is a fact that will make you question everything the next time you are stuck on the LDP at 6pm on a Friday.
Malaysia's total highway and road network measures 65,877 kilometres. The circumference of the Earth at the equator is 40,075 kilometres. Which means that if you laid every Malaysian road end to end, you could wrap it around the Earth and still have 25,802 kilometres of tarmac left over.
Let that sink in for a moment. We have built enough roads to go around the entire planet. And somehow, we are still stuck in a 45-minute jam on the Federal Highway trying to get from Bangsar to Subang.
Malaysia is one of the most densely roaded countries on the planet relative to its size. Our total land area is 329,847 square kilometres. Our road network is 65,877 kilometres long. That works out to roughly one kilometre of road for every five square kilometres of land. We have, by any objective measure, built an extraordinary amount of road.
How Did We End Up Here?
Malaysia's love affair with the road network began in earnest during the rapid industrialisation of the 1980s and 1990s under Tun Mahathir's administration. The highway expansion was part of a deliberate national development strategy, connecting peninsular Malaysia's economic centres, pushing growth into previously underdeveloped corridors, and making car ownership central to Malaysian life.
The North-South Expressway alone stretches 772 kilometres from the Thai border all the way to Johor Bahru, making it one of the longest expressways in Southeast Asia. Add to that the web of expressways crisscrossing the Klang Valley, the East Coast Expressway linking Kuala Lumpur to Kuantan, and the growing network of roads in Sabah and Sarawak, and you start to understand how the numbers add up so quickly.
It is genuinely impressive infrastructure. We built a lot of it fast, and most of it works reasonably well.
Except, Of Course, When It Does Not
Here is where the story gets very Malaysian.
We built more roads than the circumference of the Earth. And we also have, statistically, one of the highest car ownership rates in the world. Malaysia has approximately 93 vehicles per 100 people, which is extraordinarily high for a developing economy and puts us ahead of many European nations in terms of cars per capita. We love our cars. We need our cars. Public transport outside of the Klang Valley remains limited, and for most Malaysians, a car is not a luxury. It is a necessity.
So we built the roads. Then we filled the roads. Then we built more roads. Then we filled those too.
The result is what every Klang Valley resident knows intimately: peak hour traffic that turns a 20-kilometre journey into a one-hour exercise in patience, podcasts, and mild existential reflection.
The Number That Puts It In Perspective
To appreciate just how remarkable this road network is, consider this. Malaysia covers roughly 0.2% of the world's total land area. Yet we have managed to build a road network longer than the planet's own equator. Countries like Russia, China, and the United States have larger road networks in absolute terms, but they are also vastly larger countries. For a nation of our size, our road building ambition has been nothing short of extraordinary.
Whether that ambition was always optimally planned, whether we built the right roads in the right places, and whether we invested enough in rail and public transport alongside all that tarmac, these are fair questions that transport planners and urban economists continue to debate.
But the raw number? 65,877 kilometres. Longer than the Earth's circumference. From a country you could drive across in about six hours on a good day.
This is What I Think
As someone who drives in the Klang Valley regularly, I find this fact simultaneously awe-inspiring and deeply ironic. We have literally built enough road to go around the world. And on some Monday mornings, I am fairly convinced I have driven all of it just trying to get to a client meeting.
But jokes aside, this is something Malaysians should genuinely be proud of. The road network that connects our kampungs to our cities, our ports to our factories, and our states to each other did not build itself. It represents decades of planning, investment, and engineering work that quietly underpins the Malaysian economy every single day.
We just could not resist filling every single kilometre of it with cars.
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Kamarul Azwan (k.azwan@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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