Food for thought: According to the Statistics Department, Malaysia;s road fatality cases from road traffic accidents is the third highest in Asia and ASEAN only behind Thailand and Vietnam. These also includes China with a population of 1.3 Billion, Indonesia having the worst traffic jam in the world and India, notorious for its haphazard traffic and sardine packed buses. Apart from China, pardon to say India and Indonesia don’t have world class road infrastructure that we have, in fact their roads are badly maintained and laden with potholes, but yet we top the list ranking us close to even some African countries.
While in developed countries road deaths are in the single digit percentage, ours are alarmingly above average, so much so road accident deaths was ranked fourth after cardiovascular related fatality and other diseases. World Health Organisation and the World Bank reported in 2018 that Malaysia had over 7000 road deaths in 2016 with 87% being males and 13% females. Sadly, more than 50% of all road traffic deaths were motorcyclist. That is equal to 10 deaths each day!
As of now there are 12 million motorised two wheelers and 13 million cars and four wheeled light vehicles on our roads. The numbers are set to increase as more Malaysian’s find owning a vehicle is a must to move around the city. In view of the growing number of motorcycles on the road, a study was conducted to get more insights on motorcycle fatalities (published in Star). The study found the majority of the riders (89%) were aged between 16-20 years and 90% of the motorcycles where privately owned. Only 75% of them wore helmets. A morbid tale indeed, yet year on year the death rate goes up.
So its with great wonderment on why the Youth Minister would be pushing for bike ehailing service to be implemented in Malaysia as quickly as possible, when there are more serious issue that has to be addressed and brought to national level attention. Is he aware that everyday 10 young riders are losing their lives on the road? With no think tank group formed to stem and resolve these unnecessary life’s being lost, he is all ready to hand them pass cards to carry total strangers on these 2-wheels of death.
Just within weeks, the cabinet has in principal approved for Go-Jek the premier Indonesian based bike hailing platform to operate, subject to Transport Ministry’s evaluation. However, MOT Minister Anthony Loke has raised concerns about the safety of such service. We do agree the platfrorm could possibly offer 12 million motorcyclist an opportunity to earn extra, give them a sense of purpose and be self employed, this will also mean those who are reckless, have little to no experience will now be plying the highways and roads at a more frequent basis. We can only fathom the consequences of late night pick ups, sleep deprived riders and those who could be substance abusers.
Lets just hope the new Government has the wisdom and broad thinking before making irreversible decisions where peoples life’s are involved, number one objective is to bring the fatality rate as low as possible, everything else can wait.
