Rosli Azad Khan, a consultant on transport planning, said it left many questions unanswered.
“It has not gone deep enough into the operational aspects and really determined what exactly went wrong before the accident,” he told FMT.
The ministry gave the Cabinet a list of suggested improvements for Prasarana Malaysia Bhd and Rapid Rail Sdn Bhd to carry out following investigations into the collision.
In the report, the investigators cite critical safety SOPs that were not followed in the lead-up to the crash. They call for 23 short-term to long-term changes to be made to enhance the safety of the LRT operations.
Rosli said the public needed more details, such as which specific protocols were ignored by those operating the trains and why the control centre was unable to detect that the trains were on a collision course.
He also said it was not made clear why existing SOPs were not followed.
“If the public transport management company or the ministry adds more safety-related SOPs, how can people be certain these will be followed in the future, given what has happened?
“The public needs to be convinced by the report produced by the investigating team.
“This is a matter of life and death. Can the LRT operators guarantee with a high degree of certainty that such a failure will not happen again?” he said.
The collision on the Kelana Jaya line on May 24 left 47 passengers seriously injured. Many others had minor injuries.
Another transportation expert, who declined to be named, said the improvements suggested by the investigators point towards human error being the overarching issue, one which would not be solved by adding more human elements.
“The proposals mostly involve adding more people to work with an autonomous system, but it’s the people who are the problem,” he said.
“When you have a good system like ours, ideally you want it to run as autonomously as possible.”
However, he said, he “pitied” the team tasked with investigating the crash as the two weeks they were given were not enough for them to perform an in-depth probe.
“There now needs to be another more comprehensive review to look into how humans and technology interact. Bring in more expertise, even from overseas, and see what the best practices are in implementing such an autonomous system,” he said.