SERDANG, Sept 29 — Focus must be given to having additional and maintenance of motorcycle lanes in Malaysia to reduce the risk faced by motorcyclists, who record the highest number of road accidents every year.
UniversitI Putra Malaysia (UPM) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences Community Health Department Prof Dr Kulanthayan KC Mani said that in 2022, a total of 545,588 accidents were recorded, 5,671 of them were fatal accidents involving 6,080 deaths and of that number, 4,101 involved motorcyclists.
“We must remember that Malaysia was the first country in the world to introduce a motorcycle lane, but we never scaled it up.If the government can focus on having additional motorcycle lanes in places where there is a high demand for such lanes, we can reduce motorcycle accidents.
“At the same time, we need to ensure that maintenance is always carried out on the existing motorcycle lanes to enable road users or those interested to use them,” he told reporters after delivering the inaugural lecture entitled Children Safety On The Road: Public Health Vaccines at UPM, here today.
Citing Sweden and Finland as countries with efficient road safety systems, he said Malaysia cannot run away from the fact that it has a large number of motorcycle users, adding that government interventions would be able to change road accident statistics.
Kulanthayan who is also Safe Kids Malaysia founder and executive director, said road safety issues involving children must be seen from a public health perspective as a whole, because the group has six main limitations that require them to be accompanied by adults when on the road.
Among the limitations are the level of children’s vision, their ability to hear and estimate the distance of the vehicle and their difficulty to identify the movement of the vehicle.
He also emphasised on the importance of using road safety products such as child safety seats, children’s helmets (motorcycles and bicycles), dashboard cameras and children’s safety vests.
On average, over 6,000 fatal accidents were reported from 2010 to 2022 and of the number, nearly 1,000 deaths involved children.
— Bernama
