Speed limits on all roads to be reduced by 10kph during CNY

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PETALING JAYA: Speed limits will be reduced by 10kph for all federal and state roads during the Chinese New Year Ops Bersepadu operations.

Transport Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai said the speed limits would be lowered to 80kph for federal roads and 70kph for state roads during the operations from Jan 21 to Feb 5.

He said heavy vehicles would be prohibited from using the highways on Jan 26, 27, 31 and Feb 1.

"In 2016 alone, the number of fatalities due to accidents had risen sharply to over 7,000 deaths.

"This is very worrying. Statistics will remain statistics if we all don't do our part to reduce the number of accidents," he said when launching the national-level road safety campaign in conjunction with the Chinese New Year celebrations at Sunway Pyramid on Tuesday.

Liow said 6,193 fatal road accidents were recorded in 2015. This rose to 6,570 cases last year.

"The number of deaths rose to 7,152 deaths in 2016 compared to 6,706 two years ago," he added.

In total, Liow said there were 521,446 accidents last year compared to 489,606 in 2015.

Liow said human error accounted for 80.6% of road accidents while 62.7% of fatal accidents involved motorcyclists.

"The realities of the figures should be an eye-opener to everyone to adopt a safe and careful attitude when on the road," he said.

Liow said the the new Automated Awareness Safety System (Awas) is expected to be enforced in April. The Awas system is an integration of the Automatic Enforcement System (AES) and the Kejara Demerit Point System.

He said the use of camera technology and demerit point deduction system would help educate road users to abide by the law.

He said that integrated enforcement would be carried out under Ops Bersepadu during the Chinese New Year festive period. The Malaysian Institute of Road Safety (Miros) would conduct a assessment of the effectiveness of the operation during the festive period.