A road fraught with dangers

DRIVING my sister home to Penang a couple of weeks ago, I ran into a nightmare on the road.

It was about two in the morning and a bunch of motorcyclists – some 30 of them – were racing down the North-South Expressway with absolutely no regard for other road users.

My sister, in her 80s, was panicking. And truth be told, I wasn’t all that cool either.

It was the stretch between Rawang and Tanjung Malim, and the mat rempit were weaving through the rather thin traffic.

There were hardly any cars, but the wide open road was just not good enough for them.

Instead, they had to encroach into exactly where the few vehicles were, scaring the drivers.

And has anyone noticed how these madcap riders do not just overtake your vehicle but deliberately swerve in front of you before speeding away?

Knocking one of them down would have been so easy. But the repercussions would have been difficult, considering that there were some two to three dozen of them and only two of us. I held grimly on to the steering wheel.

Reaching Penang, I ran into another kind of madcap speedsters. In the wee hours of a Sunday morning, dozens of kids, mostly teens, were zipping around King Street in Little India on e-scooters.

It’s a gridiron of streets there with crossroads everywhere. One car coming from the right or left, and there would have been disaster.

What were the parents thinking, letting the children out to play at that hour, and scooting from the Esplanade to Chulia Street, running down a gauntlet of crossroads?

The children, obviously, were having fun, and friends who live there tell me it’s a regular occurrence.

Many, in fact, were grateful for the business these children and their parents bring.

But being grateful is one thing, putting lives on the line is quite another.

Which is why I tend to sympathise with Sam Ke Ting, the woman who has been sentenced to jail over an accident that saw eight mat lajak kids killed in Johor.

I feel sorry for the parents of those kids. It’s never easy to lose your children, and it’s worse if they are barely out of their teens.

However, Sam was a young person too when the accident happened, back in 2017.

She was just 22 but she was earning an honest living and driving home after work.

Her nightmare, of course, was far worse than mine.

A whole bunch of mat lajak kids – some reports say about 30 of them – had been parked (or were racing?) just over the hill as she came into the descent.

Any number of things could have happened there. She could have lost control or the cyclists could have swerved in front of her, but the end result was carnage.

The court hearing also revealed something worse.

The carnage did not just involve the accident. People had run amok, overturning her car and raising a ruckus. Who were these people? And why are they not being charged?

The accident scene had been badly tampered with, and any investigation would remain inconclusive.

Can Sam be absolved of blame? We do not know, especially since she had only given an unsworn statement and not testified under oath.

What we do know is that she had a right to be there. The road tax on her car was duly paid, she had a valid driving licence, she had her seat belt on, and she had not been drinking or texting.

The mat lajak, on the other hand, had no business being there. It was 3am. The boys should have been in bed, at home, not on the highway.

Those modified bicycles do not qualify to be on the road, much less a highway. They have no brakes, no lights, no horns, no reason to exist.

Yet, there they were.

The High Court judge has deemed that, whether the sawed-off bicycles are legal or not, it was Sam’s duty as a driver to be aware of what could be ahead.

Claiming she did not know there would be basikal lajak activity there was no excuse, the judge said. She should have driven carefully and been aware that the accident site was not well lit.

Those were the words that rang out loud in my head three days ago.

On Wednesday, after a breakout at an immigration depot, six people – two men, three girls aged eight, 14 and 18 and a nine-year-old boy – were killed trying to cross the North-South Expressway.

It was a dark highway; people who had no business being there were on the road, and a car with a sober, safe driver hit the crowd.

Six people are dead.

Will the driver be held to the same standards as Sam? Will he be expected to be aware of the unexpected before him?

I think not. It was not his fault that the escaping Rohingya refugees were on the road. I would say the same should apply in Sam’s case.

However, that’s up to the Appeals Court judges to decide.

For now, I am just grateful for what’s happening in Penang. The cops are doing something about the e-scooters.