MARCH 18 — Congratulations on your appointment as the country’s transport minister in 2018. This is no doubt an extremely demanding and time consuming job that I believe keeps your ministry fully occupied. With Malaysia having one of the world’s highest per capita road death toll I guess this should be high up on your ministry’s agenda to rectify and reduce. Please accept some recent observations while driving the roads of the peninsula more recently.

Moving machinery and more specifically rotating machinery all come with protective guards to prevent injury and death. This includes the likes of angle grinders, skill saws, meat slicers and almost any machine with rotating parts. Automobiles are designed with the wheels recessed into the vehicles chassis with no protrusion otherwise they would never pass any worldwide safety standard.

Traveling to and from work over the recent festive season when we had a rise in traffic in our area, I could not avoid noticing how many small cars were being driven around with oversized tyres sticking out from the sides of the vehicles and sometimes by up to four inches. In fact some of these cars look as though their back axle is broken and if they went over a bump the tyre would defiantly rub on the chassis. Now to top it off, the other day while sitting in a traffic jam in central Seremban, where 2 out of the 4/5 lanes of traffic are always blocked by inconsiderate drivers double parked, I noticed a Proton Perdana with ridiculously oversized tyres creeping along next to me. What was more alarming was the polished or chromed steel spikes protruding from the wheel nuts and by some inches. There also seems to be a brand of wheel rim on the local market that protrudes well beyond the oversized tyre fitted to it making the steel rim the first point of contact in the case of a collision. Just the other day driving to my office in the afternoon, I slowed down to let a MYVI bouncing along with oversized tyres, moving like a radio controlled toy driven by a 4 year old of the first time, totally out of control, get well ahead of me.

This obsession with oversized tyres is not restricted to the small to medium average family saloon cars, but the latest 4 x 4 range of pickups seem to be getting custom tyre upgrades where the tyres again are protruding up to 4 inches or more from the vehicles body. Some have gone to the extent of raising the chassis well above the oversized tyres now making the vehicle vertically unstable. These “monster trucks” are great for car shows, maybe even off-road rallying but not on roads used by other vehicles and pedestrians.

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A rotating oversized vehicle tyre will have a number of consequences when involved in a collision with another vehicle, a motorcycle, a cyclist a pedestrian and domestic or farm animal. The rotating tyre will draw whatever it hits into and then under the vehicle rather than the body knocking it away. This will be more prevalent with pedestrians, cyclists and smaller motorcycles. When the rotating tyre strikes an object similar in size or larger it will tend to lift itself and throw the vehicle unpredictably in another direction. This will include the Arco style road barriers along all major roads and highways in Malaysia. Having two rotating oversized tyres making contact at speed on any of the country’s roads is devastating to the cars involved as well as any innocent drivers in the vicinity. Look up the Mark Webber crash where he had his car flipped because of rotating tyre contact.

We are not looking at rocket science here but very basic road safety that will save lives. Have the police and road department stop vehicles with oversized tyres, give them a certain number of days to produce the car at their local Balai Polis with regulation size rims and tyres or then issue a compound and if stopped again with the dangerous tyres cancel their road tax. These oversized tyres on cars and 4x4 pickups are very dangerous and will, if they have not already, kill more people on
the Malaysian roads.
On a similar note, there seems to be a trend on lorries to use an oversized wheel nut, all ten or so of them. Many of these are on large steel wheel bases that for some reason protrude beyond the tyre and with these large oversized nuts spinning, they will cut down the side of a family car like a can opener until they come in contact with a structural frame then flicking it away.

A brief inspection of lorries at a highway stopover location will give an indication of how prevalent this trend is and it is, from my observation, the front wheels of the mid-sized delivery type truck.
Lastly, I turn left most mornings at a T junction on a national road going to work. There is no traffic light at the intersection and it can be very busy depending on the time of day. It is absolutely impossible to see the oncoming traffic from the right if the car next to me has blacked out windows.
There should be a full enforcement on tinted windows in the country as I believe this subject has been thrashed to death so many times the enforcement is now beyond a joke. If the driver of a car cannot see through the windows of the car next to him for oncoming traffic the windows are too dark and this should be illegal as it a hazard to road users.

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I believe the motorcycle users have the same problem and there and we have had a number of fatal accidents at this intersection. If you can’t see the driver of a vehicle you can guarantee they can’t and haven’t seen you.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.