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This is because the reported figure was an accumulation of registered vehicles since the British colonial days.
Expressing doubt over the report, former transport minister Liow Tiong Lai said he was certain that the number of vehicles on public roads was not more than the population.
“The heading (of the media report) is very misleading. It is not possible that the number of vehicles is more than the population of Malaysia,” he told FMT.
At the launching of JPJ’s 75th anniversary commemorative coins in November last year, its director-general Zailani Hashim stated that the department had administered 33.05 million vehicles in the past 75 years, since it was incorporated on April 1, 1946 as the Registrar and Inspector of Motor Vehicles (RIMV).
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Liow called for the government to clear the air on the matter.
“They must put the facts in the right perspective,” he said, adding that the road transport department (JPJ) should provide the true picture to avoid any confusion.
“JPJ can use the latest road tax renewal records to confirm the numbers.”
Liow also suggested that JPJ implement a “death certificate” for inactive or dormant vehicles.
“This is so that we can know exactly the number of active vehicles in the country,” the former MCA president said.
For the record, there is no “end of life” policy for vehicles in Malaysia unlike in many developed countries.
Meanwhile, former road safety department director-general Abd Ghafar Yusof said it was a norm for the statistics inherited since pre-Merdeka days to be used to reflect the number of vehicles nationwide.
“The practice of using the big number, including those gathered since British days, was applied until the day I retired. I don’t understand why it is still being used today,” he said.
“This big figure was often used to reflect the representation and ratio of deaths on the road against the number of vehicles in the country.
“For example, it would determine an ‘x’ number of casualties against the total registered vehicles at a certain point of time or throughout the year.”
Ghafar said such a method did not present the right picture of the country’s road safety index.
“I asked the transport ministry on a number of occasions to use the latest road tax renewal database to go along with the reported number of road accidents and fatalities as one of the indexes of road safety in the country,“ he said. “Sadly, it was a fruitless attempt.”
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