Moving to Penang in August

Hi Billoth,

Please feel free to participate the Malaysia Forum to create new contacts and friendship, this might help.

I suggest you to go through the Malaysia forum, Everyday life section, in order to learn interesting features Malaysia has to offer.

Thank you,

David.

welcome to malaysia

YES you should get a car. People like dissing the taxis in KL, I guess they never been to Penang.  Taxi is not an option in Penang, public transport bad in KL? Compared with Penang the KL PT is flawless.

Bayan Lepas is an mostly an industrial area, factories, factories, factories. Hopefully your accommodation will not be in Bayan Lepas area but rather Georgetown/gurney/tg bungah/bt ferringhi area. In which case you gonna need a car to get to/from work anyway.

If you are unlucky and you accommodation is in Bayan Lepas area, then you gonna need a car just to get out of there in the evenings. No matter how, you're gonna need the car!

There is a shopping mall of decent size in the area (Queensbay), but after 2-3 weekends then you seen it all there

Welcome to Penang!

As suggested by many you will need a car. For starters I would advise you to get a decent car, yet not too expensive. But the cars here are pretty pricy. The good thing is fuel is cheap. For RON 95, it is RM1.90 per liter.

Penang drivers drives with their six sense and it takes years of practice without getting your car scratched or involve in accidents LOL.

The beauty of it is that if you can drive in Penang, you can safely say you can drive anywhere in the world. The traffic in Penang is somewhat still manageable, unlike KL. Unless of course people flocks Penang due to school holiday.

Anytime I've driven  to Penang from KL, I ditch the car when I arrive and hire a bike, the Penang traffic is tediously slow most of the time.

Slow is better than being caught in a horrendous 2 hours traffic jam in KL :-)

I heard we would be getting trams/monorail or something inanely similar. I hope I'll live long enough to at least see the ground breaking ceremony :p

But yeah, a bike or bicycle along the Tanjung Bunga/Ferrighi area would be the best mode of transport.

At peak hours even those who travel by foot at times is able to wave passed by those being caught in the jam.

Bike is only an option if you have the guts to ride one in Malaysian traffic