a day ago
- Automotive
- New Straits Times
NST Leader: Unpaid traffic summonses
Malaysian vehicle owners particularly resent paying traffic summonses for illegal parking, unless forced by police action.
Motorists tend to view summonses in three informal categories. First, local council tickets are often ignored due to their perceived lack of enforcement power.
Second, traffic police summonses have more legal weight, as non-payment can lead to arrest warrants.
Still, many ignore them, especially for illegal parking.
RTD summonses, however, are usually taken seriously, as they block road tax and licence renewals until the summonses are paid.
Even then, the most stubborn ignore police and RTD's annual flat rate amnesty offers. RTD said that it collected only RM56 million from 374,024 summonses, far below the potential amount, which could have been double or triple that amount.
This suggests that many drivers aren't deterred by blacklisting — they continue driving without insurance, road tax or licences.
The police discount, valid until June 30, offers a flat RM150 rate for speeding and traffic light violations — similar to RTD's offer. Here lies the problem.
Motorists' blase attitude towards these offers reflects a contempt for traffic laws and penalties. This contempt has translated into more serious traffic offences, and more tragic accidents.
Since the discounts don't improve road safety, it's time to scrap them and revive tougher penalties that deter offenders. Sure, that would mean more officers and working hours to round up offenders.
Police may have to return to making "house calls" on offenders but it's a necessary price to forcibly change an entrenched mindset.
There is a plausible solution: integrate data sharing between the traffic police, RTD, Land Public Transport Commission (SPAD) and, while we are at it, the local councils.
Under this integration, summonses imposed by traffic police and local councils are automatically recorded by the RTD and SPAD, which immediately blacklist drivers and vehicles with outstanding summonses.
Alas, this may not happen in the near future because these agencies and their processes operate independently with little push to exchange data and information.
Even when traffic police files a request to the RTD to blacklist certain offenders, the process is tedious and inefficient.
Still, this logical and unified system isn't sidelined just yet: there are still efforts to combine the Automated Awareness Safety System, the Automated Enforcement System and the Kejara points demerit system.
There's only one problem: this initiative had been lumbering for more than a decade and it is still lumbering.
