Small thought for road safety

It seems that nowadays, Ministry of Transportation, MKJR and MiROS are busy with their agenda. A shot from TV3 showed some motorcyclists riding helmets has opened up my eyes again. Somehow, as a researcher I feel needed to find some resolution for this social matter. Authorities need to do something not only focusing in enforcement. We cannot have police traffic everywhere to watch and assure the road users are obeying the rules or not especially in rush hours.

Malaysia is actually lack of a lot of things in road environment technologies. Our VMS (Variable Message Sign) are not everywhere. We have it in KL of course but they are not giving so much information as what they have in Japan. ETC systems in Japan are actually similar to Malaysia but they have better in incident-detection management. I have the opportunity to see how they manage the traffic flow for Hanshin Expressway when I went to the Osaka Hanshin Expressway Headquarter last year.

The screen shows the route that facing the traffic jam with red colors.

There are a lot of things to talk about our road signs also. Road environment in our country is better than other East Asia country maybe but, we need more research or transfer technology in order to build up our roads towards ‘Safety First’.

Campaigns, commercial, enforcement or free helmets can’t solve the problem. We know the reality to change the attitude will take longer time than we thought. Maybe, our road users need to be alerted. If only we have the ITS technology that built in the vehicle that could aware us to use helmets or seat belts, maybe the road users will get the safety message. Or we maybe we can have the road signage that can make the road users alert about their environment. Well, it is all about the communication between the vehicle, the road environment and human. Japan did manage the communication between these sub sets.

And me, I am doing in psychological way and will try to find a way to think as creative as those Japanese!