Driving lessons from Malaysia

While a visit to Tokyo, Frankfurt or any other modern city is instructive in itself, you have to visit some of our Asian neighbours to realise that even they are way ahead of India in their wonderful roads, traffic management, cars and tourist development. Instead continuing with our know-all attitude, we should learn from their experiences and avoid mistakes we are making. Here are a few samplers:

1. Priority to automobilisation as an accelerator for economic development. Unlike India that condemned cars as toys of the elite, and fit subjects for crushing taxes and regulations, Malaysia has deliberately tried to make every Malaysian mobile. Though the country has a population of 23 million people, or about 6 million households, it has 4.3 million cars and 5.4 million motorcycles. Every urban family and one in three rural families have cars. Taxes make them quite expensive, but petrol and diesel costs half as much as in India and so, almost everyone can afford motorised travel. If India does reduce the prices of petrol, as it has committed to do with the lifting of APM from April, it will give a big boost to the demand for scooters, bikes and cars and stimulate production of vehicles and components.

2. Car sales in 2001 in the Far East have staged a recovery after the economic slump of 1998 and sales in Malaysia, for instance, should hit 385,000 units this year. So while their population is just about 2.3 per cent of ours, Malaysians buy about 70 per cent as many cars as we do. Public sector companies like Proton, in collaboration with Mitsubishi, and Perodua, in collaboration with Daihatsu, dominate the market with 8 main models. Apart from these car makers who enjoy a tax advantage, 15 other auto majors including BMW, Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Peugeot and Toyota have assembly plants making about 50 other models. The Indian industry need have little fear of imports flooding in if customs duties are brought down from the ridiculous 120 per cent prevailing today. Not very many people would be able to buy these cars even if the duties were halved, but motoring in India would be much more interesting.

3. Every car in the world can be freely imported after paying high customs duties, but sales of these imported models are high. Tata sells about 50 trucks and about 15 of the new 207 Twincab 4x4 vehicles per month. Mitsubishi has a small equity stake and several technical collaborations, but Proton can also shop elsewhere. They recently bought the majority stake of Lotus Motors of UK and are using this expertise for their own R&D.

4. One of the factors that spurred the automobilisation of Malaysia was their 800-km North-South highway. It is now acknowledged to have been an important engine of Malaysia’s economic growth and has become the model for many countries. The highway has been designed to be an artery for the development of smaller towns near the big cities and has prevented slums and urban overcrowding. The Indian government must take a lead with decongesting India’s metros by shifting many offices to smaller suburban towns.

5. India is making a huge mistake in its programme of highway development by only widening existing highways that link long chains of small and large towns and villages. Thus, traffic becomes a dangerous mix of fast and slow vehicles. Unless these are segregated, lower speed limits will be imposed, defeating the entire purpose of building highways – fast and economical long distance travel. A real toll highway does not connect towns but bypasses them, mainly allowing fast travel for long distance cars, trucks and buses. Our so-called highways are actually just wider roads connecting towns and therefore, become clogged by all the tractors, carts, cycles and other inter-town traffic. Under Malaysian law, good secondary roads have to be available for local inter-city traffic or for those who do not want to pay the toll.

6. With the removal of pedestrians and slow-moving mixed transport in Malaysia,
compared to India, there are very few highway accidents, while the maximum speed limit is higher at 110 kph. There are emergency phone booths every 250 metres and police patrol cars check the route every hour. Trucks can only ply near cities at slack hours and overloading is closely regulated. As state sales tax is standardised, the tax barriers that cause so much delay, corruption and harassment have been scrapped.

7. Unlike the situation in India, the condition of all vehicles has to be regularly checked and vehicle owners can pay their annual road tax at post offices. Seat belts, road regulations and driving licences are strictly checked, because most Malaysians are normally as irresponsible as their Indian counterparts and believe that the red light is to stop, the green light is to go and the yellow light is to move even faster.