Road casualties: A disease to Malaysian?

I will start with an interesting fact: The world’s first road traffic death involving a motor vehicle is alleged to have occurred on 31 August 1869. An Irish scientist Mary Ward died when she fell out of her cousins' steam car and was run over by it. Hundred and forty one years later, millions of people died in traffic accidents.

I guess in a few days, Malaysia Road Safety Department will release a new road casualty’s statistics for this year Hari Raya. Since 2001, an average of 15 people died each day on the road. What a remarkable stat for 28 million inhabitants. In general, Malaysian road fatalities are at 10 for every 100,000 population. If we compare with UK, with 62,041,708 of population, in 2006 they had one of the lowest road death rates in the EU, at 5.4 per 100,000 populations. Malaysia rate was also higher than the rates for other industrialised nations such as the United States (14.3 per 100,000 populations), Australia (7.8 per 100,000 populations) and Japan (5.7 per 100,000 populations).

An article entitle OVERVIEW OF CURRENT ROAD SAFETY SITUATION IN MALAYSIA by Mohamad Nizam Mustafa Highway Planning Unit Road Safety Section Ministry of Works stated that the increase of road accidents were in link with the rapid growth in population, economic in development, industrialisation and motorisation encountered by the country. I agree with some of his points but other countries are also developing but with less road casualties. There were a lot of safety campaign strategized by the governing bodies but I guess none has worked. Road accidents in Malaysia cost the country's economy 9.3 billion ringgit (2.97 billion dollars) last year, equivalent to 1.5 per cent of the gross domestic product.

According to statistic, the highest fatality ages of victims were between ages of 21-25 and the highest fatality mode of transport was motorcycle. This isn’t a surprise as we know that most of our youth use motorcycle as their main transportation. How are we going to stop motorcyclists from become one of the statistics? I don’t know! Maybe stop selling Honda cup, RXZ 125-Z etc etc. and start selling only scooter or low risk motorcycles. Maybe... I’m not going to talk about public transportations or road regulations yet as those topics deserved another entry I guess.

Has this become a culture to us? If you turn to other pages instead of reading those terrifying reports then I think we agree that it has become a culture. To me, road accidents have become a disease. A disease that has neither cure nor ending in our society. My fellow road users, I think it’s not because of the cars, roads, signboards or anything else. It’s all because of you! Think wisely and carefully before you drive. We have always known every Malaysian are smarter when they’re off the roads.If you can do the same on the roads, I think your family and friends will appreciate it.

I will end this entry by uploading one shocking video that I've took from my friend FB wall. You can see it on my FB wall.