Automologist MAC’s daily experience on the roads of Kuala Lumpur has him asking this question…
This morning, after dropping my son off at school, I had yet another near miss with a young motorcyclist, in fact about twenty plus of them on 11 bikes. I was driving around a corner and they were speeding in the opposite direction on the wrong side of the road in what appeared to be a race to get into the school that I was passing. No one was hurt, but only due to blind luck, particularly as about half of them were not wearing helmets.
None of the children who then decided to verbally assault me looked old enough to shave yet alone be in charge of a piece of machinery that accounted for 70% of road deaths in Malaysia last year. It is exactly this sort of cavalier attitude towards road safety that has led to a call to raise the minimum age for a motorcycle license to 21. More than 40% of those who die are aged between 16 and 25.
Malaysian motorcyclists die at the rate of about 5,000 riders a year; by anyone’s reckoning, this has to be described as carnage, but like many other countries, Malaysians choose to almost ignore the death toll. Perhaps just as bad are the over 200,000 accidents that require hospital treatment. This has led to calls to segregate road traffic or to go as far as banning all motorbikes.
There most definitely is a problem with the attitude of bikers in Malaysia which you rarely see in other countries. As they get onto a bike, Malaysian riders seem to don an alter-ego. It is like they have just been transported into some sort of video game in which getting in front of the vehicle in front of you scores you some sort of imaginary points. And all done whilst wearing no real safety gear except from an aging helmet. When you come off, you just press the reset button, right?
GIVE YOUR CAR THE TREATMENT IT DESERVES:
Not a day goes by without me taking some sort of emergency action to avoid a motorcyclist on the roads of Kuala Lumpur. But for me, banning motorcyclists is not the answer. Starting road education in the classroom at a much younger age would be a better option. Education that talks about courtesy and shows the youngster what happens when you end up as a quadriplegic. Instruct them about how to wear ‘cool’ safety equipment and then make the test really, really, really hard to pass.
As a society, we are good at telling people what they cannot do. But taking away an offender’s license doesn’t work; there is so little enforcement they simply carry on riding without a license. So, let’s trying the education approach and if this fails to change their attitude, then get them to do community service in the very hospital wards where many of their friends are recuperating.
