LOKE: No More Summons, Straight To Court If You Break The Law This CNY

Minister of Transport, YB Anthony Loke yesterday announced during the launch of the Integrated Ops and Road Safety Campaign in Sepang that this upcoming Chinese New Year (CNY) holidays, seven traffic offences would be set to be non-compoundable.

What this translates to is if you are caught breaking any of this law, you would be straight referred to court instead of the usual fine based summonses. The seven traffic offences set to be non-compoundable are cutting queue, overtaking on double lines, disobeying red light signals, driving over the speed limit, using mobile phones while driving, not wearing your seat belt or helmet and driving on the emergency lane.

Loke further added that these strict enforcement among others are measures taken in an attempt to bring down the number of road accidents and deaths which spike during every festive season.

According to him further, the Malaysian road safety awareness level has yet to reach a satisfactory level. This is based on the 119 deaths recorded during a similar operation during 2022 Chinese New Year celebrations. Moreover the daily accident rates are also unsatisfactory as the Royal Malaysian Police (PDRM) statistics shows 370,286 crashes and 4,539 deaths in 2021.

Just in the recent year, 402,626 road crashes with 4,379 deaths were recorded from the short period of Jan to Sep 2022, Loke added.

As an additional effort to reduce road congestion this CNY holiday, all goods transporting vehicles will be banned from being on the roads for four days on Jan 20 and 21 plus on January 24 and 25.

Loke added, “This prohibition is intended to avoid the risk of road accidents due to mixed traffic flow between heavy vehicles and light vehicles on the road, highways, apart from avoiding traffic jams.”

Furthermore, as reported earlier, the Road Transport Department (JPJ) would also be deployed in full force with stricter enforcement this year. A total of 2000 JPJ officers would be on duty with the aim of reducing road crashes and deaths. Furthermore, some of these officers would go ‘under-cover’ in plain clothes even as regular express bus passengers in order to apprehend dangerous driving express bus drivers. 

(Source: New Strait Times & Malay Mail)