Kelantan

(After being preoccipied with whatnots, im finding myself interesting subjects from the national front.)

Rahim Concerned Over Kelantan's High Rate Of Road Accidents

KUALA KRAI, July 5 (Bernama) -- Deputy Transport Minister Datuk Abdul Rahim Bakri today expressed concern over the high rate of road accidents in Kelantan.

He said 175 people were killed on Kelantan roads in the first five months of this year, which was almost 35 per cent of the 544 deaths for the whole country.

In the first five months of last year, 151 had died on Kelantan roads, he said when launching a road safety campaign in Sungai Sok, Manik Urai, here, on Sunday.

According to a study of the Road Safety Research Centre of Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), 60 per cent of road deaths involved motorcyclists and pillion-riders who usually suffered serious head injuries, he said.

He said that based on a report of the Royal Malaysia Police, most of these accidents took place in the rural areas.

Abdul Rahim said the Transport Ministry, through the Road Safety Department, intended to halve the number of accidents by next year.

He said the strategy included encouraging the use of crash helmets of Sirim standard, raising awareness on the proper way of wearing helmets and getting motorists to be more cautious and disciplined as well as to obey traffic rules.

At the event, Abdul Rahim gave away crash helmets to 300 adults and 20 youngsters.

-- BERNAMA


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Personally and through own experience, in general Kelantanese drivers are of the worst drivers. Not because they don't know how to drive well compare to other people, but they posses bad driving attitudes and are of the sort that never give even any thought about the consequences of their dangerous driving.

Usually these drivers are those who came from the lower income group and drives local made Proton or Peroduas cars that highly make-up with cheap accessories and generally would be fitted with 'super-duper' exhaust that presumably could heighten the speed of the cars and they would rammed the rpm right up to the highest to beat some other higher cc cars.

They change lanes or cut lines without having any consideration of the geographical layout of the road, oncoming vehicles, or even the speed of the car in front of theirs.
This especially more evident during the rush of 'balik kampung' travelling for Eid celebrations. The usual journey which would take around seven hours or so, will be dragged to sometimes 12 hours (as per my own experience). Perhaps because of these ' slow downs' they tend to drive even faster to get back to their kampungs.

I could attest 99% of the Kelantanese people find their money elsewhere in bigger towns such as Kuala Lumpur, Johor Baharu or Penang. But they concentrate more in the cosmopolitan Kuala Lumpur to earn their bread and butter.
Nevertheless, they are the sort of urban dwellers that enjoy going back to their hometown every other weekends. They are a very 'close-knit' lots that would discard other people originated from other parts of the country (Malaysia) except maybe Terengganu because they are the "east -coast" people and speaks similar dialects (perhaps) besides possessing very distinctive liking towards driving recklessly.

My thought on all this effort by the government is what can the authorities do to curb these dilemma when it is living and flowing hot in their blood?