“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.”
“Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace,
for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man." “It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
From basikal lajak to kereta lajak - five issues By Andrew Sia
Saturday, May 14, 2022
Malaysiakini : The whole lajak controversy has brought out the rot that’s been slowly eating away at our country.
1) What are the cops doing?
In
the mid-1970s, a police officer in Teluk Intan issued a summons of RM10
(a grand sum in those days!) to my friend Gilbert Lee for riding a
bicycle without a bell.
“They even checked the front light, rear reflector and the brakes,” he recalled.
If
back then, the police were so hardworking to ensure cyclists obeyed all
the laws, what has happened now? The cops claim that it’s “very
difficult” to catch lajak boys who always find ways to escape.
Really?
Are naughty boys on bicycles really able to outwit and outrun a team of
traffic cops on high-powered motorcycles? If so, how will they catch
real criminals? Or terrorists?
Or is the real reason because our
cops prefer to focus on motorists? Because the delicate verbal dance of
“sekarang macam mana mau tolong?” (how to help now?) is, shall we say,
more “attractive” than chasing after lajak boys?
2) Road safety classesfor kids
In Germany, it’s common to see primary school kids cycling safely to school. How do they do it?
For one, the German Accident Prevention Organisation (DVW) does “learning by playing” road safety classes with mini traffic signs and crash test dummies.
Characters
like Captain Bluebear tell funny stories about road dangers. A real
truck demonstrates how a whole school class can “disappear” in the
vehicle’s blind spot as it turns.
I’ve not heard of such courses
done in Malaysia on a large scale. Yet this is exactly what politicians,
who claim to “defend and protect” a certain race, should be doing to
stop lajak cyclists from killing themselves.
So what will happen
when the kids grow up? We already know the answer to that because many
adult drivers and motorcyclists don’t seem to understand simple road
dangers such as blind spots. That’s why we are a world “champion” in the
rate of traffic accidents with one road death every 84 minutes.
3) Lack of discipline
In
the good old days, if kids behaved badly, parents would “rotan” or cane
them properly. That would knock some common sense into them, yeah?
Some
people say we can’t blame parents for the lajak problem. Why? Because,
oh the poor folks are too tired or busy trying to earn a living. Or, the
low-cost flats are too crammed (whose fault is that?) and so the
parents have to allow their kids to endanger their lives (and that of
others) by roaming the streets at 3am on their basikal lajak.
I sympathise with their hardship but then again, why are other poor parents able to discipline their offspring?
Besides, the police already warned
parents (back in 2020) that they can be fined up to RM20,000 or jailed
up to five years if they neglected their basikal lajak kids. So were the
police just joking? Was this yet another law that was meant to be
ignored?
It’s
not just the kids that need some discipline. The next time there is
another lajak accident, the police should try putting the parents in the
lockup, for say two or three nights. I suspect that this may “wake up”
lenient parents about their child-rearing responsibilities.
4) Road design/maintenance
In
the Johor tragedy, the speed limit on the three-lane highway suddenly
changed from 70kph to 50kph. But a probe by Miros (Malaysian Institute
of Road Safety Research) found that the signboard announcing this was
hidden behind a Petronas signboard.
There were no speed breakers
(many small speed bumps) either to signal drivers to slow down as the
road crested a hill. To worsen matters, the accident area was dimly lit.
A curving road fed into the highway and there were no orange road
bollards to deter bicycles from surging straight onto the path of
drivers.
These are all old problems with Malaysian road
maintenance. Signboards hidden by tree branches because nobody bothers
to trim them. Bushes planted thoughtlessly at junctions, blocking the
sight of oncoming vehicles. Deep potholes left unrepaired, waiting to
kill motorcyclists at night.
Do we need more tragedies before
something is done? Sadly, nothing changes because we don’t vote for our
local council officials. Instead, they answer only to the state
government politicians who appoint them.
5) Kereta lajak, lori lajak
Back to the underaged MPV driver
who rammed into two grass cutters in Kedah. It has been five days
(since May 8) and there is still no news of the parents being charged.
Was it just a PR statement by the MCA transport minister to placate
those angry with him over how a Chinese driver was blamed for the whole
Johor lajak tragedy?
But more seriously, while middle-class
Malaysians like to condemn the two-wheeled terrors of basikal lajak,
they may forget four-wheeled road menaces.
Political commentator Mariam Mokhtar
says that Mat Lajak and Mat Rempit mostly seem to be of one race. Sure,
nobody has heard of Ah Beng Lajak, but I can assure you that I have
been a victim of Ah Beng road bullies in souped-up Hondas who love to
intimidate other drivers with their blinding headlights and booming
exhaust pipes.
These
are what I call kereta lajak (driven by all races) that love to speed
in housing areas while people are walking or cycling. Their mission in
life is to see how fast they can “sapu” (sweep) a corner without giving a
damn about what’s around it.
And what about the six or
eight-wheeled road horrors? When driving on the highway on rainy nights,
I often see buses clearly going beyond the speed limit even though they
are carrying 20 or 30 lives on a slippery road.
On the four-lane
highway between Sungai Buloh and Rawang, I have seen buses overtaking on
the fourth (fastest) lane while lorries are on the third
(second-fastest lane). Our highways can seem like Wild West cowboy
country.
On May 12, a car slowed down and stopped behind a lorry
on the highway. But another 20-tonne trailer laden with iron rods failed
to brake on time, rammed into the car, and smashed it into the first
lorry. The car burst into flames, killing all five university students inside.
Such
is the general “tidak apa” lawlessness in this country, that we often
hear of bus and lorry drivers doing extra trips and then keeping
themselves awake with syabu or crystal meth. Have the laws been enforced
against this great danger?
We can build the world’s
second-tallest skyscraper again and again. But if we can’t tackle basic
road safety, then we are still a backward country.
So don’t just
blame basikal lajak. We also have traffic threats with kereta lajak, bas
lajak and lori lajak. It’s not just some kids who have an attitude
problem, the adults may be guilty too.
