Community Engagements in Road Safety: Experiences from My Safe Road Programme in Malaysia

Abstract

The Malaysian government has initiated many road safety initiatives to reduce road crashes, such as crash prevention, crash reduction, road maintenance, and construction of sustainable roads. However, none of those initiatives have direct contributions from the community level. This paper aims to study the effectiveness of engaging local communities in realising Malaysia’s road safety index. States in Malaysia can face serious issues in road safety performance if road safety indexes and their associated initiatives are solely derived from injury and death data without any participation from the local community. Therefore, the community engagement experiences from My Safe Road Programme were explored to be utilized as a benchmark in realising the national strategic road safety index framework. The findings indicate that while various localities shared certain road safety issues, there were also issues exclusive to specific localities only. Community engagement has been proven to be highly efficient in identifying local road safety issues and risky locations. Therefore, more intense and structured community engagement sessions should be planned to understand the root cause of road safety issues in each state and aid in establishing the Malaysian Road Safety Index.