ROAD ACCIDENT IN MALAYSIA

Malaysia is considered relatively safe for driving compared to other developing countries. But if we observe past years’ and recent road accidents statistics/reports, we can perceive that the propensity of road accidents in Malaysia is on the rise. Now I think, Malaysia really requires an investigation in the geographical distribution and regional variation of accidents rather than looking at the accidents in a national perspective. There may be certain geographical areas where accident proneness may be higher. These variations in accidents can be analyzed by developing a set of geographical indicators for different categories of vehicles (buses/cars/motorcycles/tucks) such as percentage of accidents involving a particular category of vehicle in a particular geographical area (state/district); vehicle related accidents per 100 vehicles in a particular geographical area; accidents per million vehicle kilometers in a particular geographical area, etc These indicators may be rudimentary in nature as they only indicate the extent of problem and have several limitations. Furthermore, these indicators can be used for developing an accident proneness index for each geographical division.

The following figure shows an approach that can be adopted for developing an Accident Proneness Index for each category of vehicles. It may be generally assumed that the traveling environment in general is unsafe due to a large number of factors. However, there are certain specific factors that influence accidents (for a particular category of vehicle) more adversely than other minor factors. The factors of unsafe environment such as road condition, driving habits, condition of vehicles, enforcement level, etc. are difficult to measure effectively.

Accidents are generally classified as single vehicle accidents in which the vehicle is either colliding with fixed objects or with pedestrians or the vehicle may fall in a ditch etc. and multiple vehicle accidents in which two or more