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Press Statement by Transport Minister on Road Safety Issue |
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Written by Administrator
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Friday, 05 February 2010 |
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With Chinese New Year around the corner, many will be heading back to their hometowns to celebrate the festivity. It is also during such long festive periods that we read media reports about road accidents during the exodus back home.
Each year, the Government spends millions of ringgit to make our roads safer and we are progressing well in this respect. This is despite recent media reports about the growing number of accidents on Malaysian routes. Some of these media reports, if interpreted wrongly, can be misleading.
Statistics obtained from the Malaysian Institute of Road Safety Research (MIROS) has shown that the Government’s intervention programmes have responded well. In accordance with international practices, MIROS, with the co-operation of the Police and Road Transport Department, has been tracking three key road safety indicators over the years.
Based on the 2009 data, all three have shown improvements and the numbers do not lie. The performance index covers the number of fatalities per 10,000 registered vehicles, per billion vehicle-kilometer traveled (VKT) and per 100,000 populations. The global perspective of road safety do not just account for the number of fatalities, but it must be taken in the light of the increasing exposure due to increase in number of population, vehicles and the amount of travelling made.
In 1989, the Malaysian population stood at 17.4 million, but has since increased to 28.31 million in 2009. For the same period, the number of registered vehicles has also increased from 4.15 million to 19.02 million. As a comparison, there were 75,626 cases of traffic accidents in 1989 and the figure has increased five-fold to 397,330 cases in 2009.
The number of fatalities increased at a much slower rate from 3,773 to 6,745 during the same period, indicating improvements on road safety. It was clear that the numbers of road casualty would have been worse if the intervention and concerted efforts given to manage road safety were not executed.The statistics also show that in 2009, Malaysia has achieved a fatality index of 3.55 deaths per 10,000 registered vehicles, compared to 3.63 in 2008 and 5.83 in 1999.
With this achievement, Malaysia is now ranked 46th out of 172 countries in the world, almost reaching the top quarter together with many high-performance countries for low fatality for every 10,000 registered vehicles. This is based on the recently-published World Health Organization’s, Global Status Report on Road Safety.In terms of fatality index per billion VKT, the figure has also improved from 26.79 deaths per VKT in 1999 to 17.65 deaths in 2008. The VKT index continues to improve to 17.28 deaths last year.
The fatality index per 100,000 populations has also improved over the years with 23.83 deaths nationwide in 2009, compared to 25.5 deaths 10 years earlier.
Such improvements do not mean that the Government takes lightly the sorrows and hardship faced by accident victims and their next-of-kin. Any loss of lives and limbs on Malaysian roads is an unnecessary loss to the country.The improvements will only spur the Government and the Ministry of Transport to work harder towards making Malaysian roads safer.
5 February 2010
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