GEORGE TOWN, April 25 — Big scale construction works on the Mutiara LRT line in Penang will start in the fourth quarter of next year, according to MRT Corp Chief Executive Officer Datuk Mohd Zarif Mohd Hashim.

He said there has been substantial progress in the project even in the past three months, with contractors starting with soil investigations.

“After the soil investigations have completed, we will be able to finalise the design and after that, we need to look at the locations with utilities to be relocated,” he told reporters at the LRT Mutiara Line Aidilfitri celebrations here.

He said the alignment will be on a lot of road reserve, so utilities on these roads will need to be relocated first before construction works start.

“Six months from now, we will see small machinery in these areas to relocate the utilities,” he said.

He added that this meant that big scale construction works for the project will only start to take shape by the fourth quarter of next year.

He said the project progress may seem to be slow at first, but the target delivery date for the project is only on December 31 of 2031.

“We still have five years to go. So, it is normal that during the initial years, because projects like this, they follow the ‘S’ curve, the shape of ‘S’,” he said.

He said the S curve means that the beginning of the project will be a bit slow and it is only after it reaches a certain critical mass, it will speed up.

“I would say the ‘S’ will come in after 2027, 2028, where you can see it’s actually taking shape at the slope of the S curve,” he said.

He added that the progress of the project would have reached the top of the ‘S’ curve by 2029.

“And that brings us to another two years until the end of 2031,” he said.

He said the public’s expectations are that this will be a long-drawn project, but they will try to expedite it as best as they can.

So, what I’m saying actually, I know there’s expectation from people of Penang and the state of Penang that this has been a long-drawn project. But we are doing our best in order to expedite this.

“We hope to maintain this current momentum and hopefully, we can do better than our target timeline,” he said.