Former transport minister, Liow Tiong Lai, has expressed his doubts over a recent report stating that there are now more registered vehicles on the road than the human population in the country.
In a report by Free Malaysia Today (FMT), Liow pointed out that the reported figure was an accumulation of registered vehicles since the British colonial days. So, the number 33 million is an exaggeration and does not portray the true picture of the current vehicle population.
This is supported by a statement made by the Road Transport Department (JPJ)’s director-general Zailani Hashim last year who told the media that the department has administered 33.05 million vehicles in the past 75 years.
This means that the number of vehicles dates back all the way to 1-April-1946 when JPJ was still then known as the Registrar and Inspector of Motor Vehicles (RIMV).
Registrar and Inspector of Motor Vehicles (RIMV)
Liow called for the government to step up and “clear the air on the matter” to avoid any confusion. He suggests using the latest road tax renewal records to confirm the numbers.
Other than that, Liow also suggests that JPJ start implementing a ‘death certificate’ for inactive or dormant vehicles. This will further help keep track of the number of active vehicles in the country.
Meanwhile, former road safety department director-general Abd Ghafar Yusof told FMT that it was a norm for the statistics inherited since pre-Merdeka days to be used to reflect the number of vehicles nationwide.
He claims that the practice of using big numbers, including those gathered since British days, was applied until the day he retired. The figure is often used to reflect the representation and ratio of deaths on the road against the number of vehicles in the country.
He too agreed that such a method does not present the right picture of the country’s road safety index.
Keyword: Former transport minister: Not true that vehicle population is higher than Malaysians