Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Kencana Square Not Gonna Make It

As it turned out, Kencana Square's sales has been very slow. In my opinion, it is suffering the same fate as Plaza Pantai with very poor access from the KL side.

Let's take a look at this map below. Taking the point from directly opposite the center of Kencana Square, which is the site of the existing Subang Jaya KTM station, one has to route into Subang Jaya through often very congested roads to make one big loop into Kencana Square. The access from the Federal Highway (from direction of Klang) is beside the Shell station. This route is 4.4km long. My personal experience getting stuck in traffic inching into the Subang Jaya entrance and around the U-turn before Subang Parade is approximately 1 hour.



Another option, slightly shorter, maybe better is via the Subang Airport road and Glenmarie. This route is just over 3km and the Subang Airport road can also be very congested due to it being a bottle neck serving the Kg Subang, Ara Damansara and access to the NKVE.


With 2 LRT stations and a KTM station, will this make Kencana Square attractive? Perhaps, .... but bear in mind that even from the existing Kelana Jaya Station, it takes over 30mins to reach KL Sentral i.e. 10 stations!


Kencana Square and Subang Jaya will have an additional 4 - 5 stops before reaching Kelana Jaya. This makes Plaza Pantai a tad more advantageous compared with Kencana Square. 

The way I look at it, UOA need to construct a fly over or tunnel into Kencana Square from the Federal Highway to make this more attractive. Having public transport is good but how many people likes to take public transport in KL? Those who don't know the answer should make a trip during rush hour. The trains are jam packed which shows that they are well subscribed but I think the system has already reached its' capacity and the extension of the route is certainly not going to help. 


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