Malaysian Roads are Killing Fields

[Marya]

The double-barrelled festive celebrations are now finally over. And so is the seasonal killing spree on Malaysian roads and highways.
That is why my feeling of joyous participation in our nation’s festive holidays has always been dampened. One knows very well beforehand that tens of thousands of road accidents will occur each time, including hundreds of fatalities, some of which would be excruciatingly gruesome and unnecessary.

We are told that every year, something like 6000 Malaysians die on the road. Road accidents must rank as one of the foremost causes of death in our country. Is there anyone among us who has not had a relative or friend who perished in a road accident?

As I get older, I think about how I am going to die. As they say, death and taxes are the two only certainties in life. You cannot get out of this life alive. But one does not fear death as much as the manner of death, over which one has very little choice.

I would hate to die in a road accident. To die by the so-called natural causes is grim enough, but acceptable, as the will of God, or the dictate of nature. But it does seem such a waste to die in a burst of flame, crushed into an unrecognisable pulp, extricated from the hideously twisted wreck of a motor vehicle by firemen using chainsaws. .

That is why during these festive holidays, I do not balik kampong, but sit at home and read my philosophy books.

But the rest of the nation would probably join in the exodus from the cities. We are told that more than 10 million vehicles would choke our highways and our roads. And this staggering figure does not even include heavy vehicles, which are usually banned at the height of the annual national festive jam.

Thousands of policemen and enforcement officers from the Land Transport Department will be mobilised to watch the major traffic arteries like hawks. Operations with fancy names – with sequels in subsequent years – will be launched with much fanfare. There is the annual deluge of stern warnings to motorists issuing from a phalanx of severe looking public officials, promising retributions of brimstone and hell-fire for those who flout the traffic laws.

The ‘mindset’

All these efforts will be for naught, when the dust has settled, and the body count started. Year after year, the media dutifully report the inevitable carnage, with detailed statistics and lively pictures that tell the stories better than a million words. The politicians and the top cops wring their hands in frustration, and promise even tougher measures to punish errant motorists of all descriptions, knowing full well in their heart that next year, the same killing spree would repeat itself without fail.

When the finger-pointing has reached its frenzy, the culprit responsible for the maiming and the deaths on our roads usually turns out to be this elusive entity called “mindset”. The public response of those high officials with jurisdiction over law enforcement and land transport is to propose all manners of more stringent social engineering, to forge new attitudes and a new mindset that are supposed to solve this apparently unsolvable problem.

This year, the minister of transport, appearing to be visibly angry on television, blamed parents for allowing their young children to use motor vehicles without driving licences. He cannot be all that wrong. You can virtually blame parents for all kinds of criminal and social ills in our community, ranging from drugs to gangsterism, for not having taught their children well and exercised proper supervision over them.

But for once, the minister is not all that off the mark. He says that it will take a whole generation of future road users to learn how to drive responsibly. At least, somebody has realised that there is no ready-made quick fixes to this perennial problem. That is a good start.

Inevitably, someone would propose formal education as the panacea for all our national problems. Start them young, and fill them with the right kind of attitude, they say. Why, we could even prescribe road safety as a compulsory subject from the primary level upward.

As a young student, even under British rule, I had taken part in some road safety campaigns in school. Of course, such campaigns should begin in all our schools. But any hope that it will therefore minimise road fatalities in 10 or 20 years’ time will be misplaced.

The educational philosophy is itself a problem. But that is not yet the point. Everybody knows that schooling is for passing examinations. For good social values, children depend more on their informal education in the home, and in their social environment as such.

Egoistical hedonism

Our economy is one heavily driven by the automobile industry. It has something to do with the nationalist aspirations behind our National Automobile Policy. Whether inadvertently or by design, the public transport system neither transports efficiently, nor does it serve the general public. Buses have become a public menace, a health hazard to commuters, and a means of killing on the roads.

If you look at the advertisement put out by the industry, what they sell is more than a product. They are peddling a version of the good life. A car or a motor bike is not merely a tool, and it is much more than a necessity (which it is not). The motor vehicle is the very embodiment of Being, as if, without a motor vehicle, one is less than human. All that one wishes in life, pleasure, prestige, personal worth, freedom and dignity, can all be realised in the possession and use of a stupid machine.

In a big city like KL, who you are depends on the type of wheels that ferry you around. Racing down the highway, walled in within the metal enclosure of your air-conditioned kingdom, you are supposed to feel like “king of the Road”!

The King cannot be wrong, as one King announced during the Great English Revolution a few hundred years ago. Nothing amplifies this false imperial condescension than Malaysians’ driving habits. After all, Malaysians have, over the decades, developed this modernist ethos of getting ahead in life, at all cost. Nothing else drives these bad habits more powerfully than this new national ideology of egoistical hedonism. After all, the pace and standard has been set by our political practices.

That is why more stringent law enforcement and heavier punishment will not reduce our accident rate and road deaths. Yes, most people will obey the laws out of the fear of being caught and punished. But that fear alone is not sufficient to ensure that people will obey the laws at all time, even when nobody is watching.

For one thing, there are not enough traffic cops to watch all roads all the time. What is to prevent people from going through a red light at a major intersection at 3 in the morning, when roads in all directions are deserted? Pretty soon, going through red lights become a habit. Nay, if fear of the police is the motivation for obeying laws, than going through a red light, or driving through a zebra crossing has become a challenge!

Ultimately, the horrendous and rampant disregard for law and order on our roads and highways betrays our national obsession with rule by law, and not rule of law, the former emphasising rule by coercion, and the latter, the voluntary observation of laws by public spirited citizens based on their recognition that obeying good laws is an end in itself.

Moral authority

In a society where democracy is a way of life, and its values of mutual respect and civic responsibility penetrate to the innermost recesses of the consciousness of all citizens, people obey laws out of their own accord, irrespective of the consequences of not obeying laws, simply because it is the right thing to be law-abiding. But first of all, the laws have to be reasonable and good, and be seen to work for the betterment of all, and worthy of one’s allegiance and acquiescence.

To put it in simple language, when motorists and road users think corruption whenever they come into sight of traffic policemen, it is unlikely the traffic laws will enjoy any moral authority in their mind.

What this all means is that, though we do have First World infrastructure, we have Third World socio-political practices in our rule by law. It is all too easy to blame it all on the low standard of our citizenry. As the ancient Greeks had discovered as early as 2000 years ago, the principle function of the Law is not merely to coerce and maintain order. The primary task of the Law is to make citizens good.

The true transformation of a Third World nation to the status of a First World requires many generations. In the case of the developed nations, it has taken centuries. Malaysia should take a shorter route, because we have the advantage of our historical learning curve. The trouble is that our politicians and our law enforcement agencies insist on repeating all the mistakes of the past, rather than learning from them.

By Sim Kwang Yang
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