Tuesday, September 09, 2008

How to make the motorist behave?


According to Kompas, there are 575 death motorist during January to August 2008 period. In fact, there are 3,029 accidents occur during the same period. How to reduce this incidents for getting intensify?

Some people argued that it occurs due to lack of discipline among motorist as well as lack of particular infrastructure for motorcycle rider, i.e. special line for motorcycle. However, if we understand the behavior of motorist you maybe need to read and understand about Peltzman Effect. The key issue in Peltzman Effect as far as I understand is we need to compensate motorists lack of concern on risk of their bad behavior during riding motorcycle.

As we may seen recently, the technology and safety equipment for riding motorcycle are getting enhanced and sophisticated. All of those support system for making the motorist getting safer during ride make them feel secure and abandon the safety riding method during travel. In addition, the method to buy new motorcycle is getting easier with credit payment system. Combining those situation, we will see two simple fact about motorists and their motorcycle: 1) their population (motorists as well as their motorcycle) will increase sharply, 2) their behavior will become more "barbaric" and potentially increasing number of motorcycle related accidents.

Now, what is the effective solution to reduce that problem? My simple solution is raise the cost of admission for motorcycle licences (to get SIM C in Indonesia). In fact, if possible, we need to make that getting motorcycle licence (SIM C) should a lot more expensive than getting driving (car) licence (SIM A). Why? Higher price need to be established in motorcycle licence as signaling that riding motorcycle are having more risks than driving cars. With such policy, we will obtain two results:

1) reducing number of motorist
Of course, we will have "rich vs poor" motorist that potentially discriminate them on riding motorcycle. But, since the rich might be able to pay for the risk (of having accident) then it should make sense to give them more chance to ride motorcycle.

2) increasing discipline among motorist
Higher price of getting licence for riding motorcycle will make only selected and better-skill motorist that able to ride motorcycle. With extensive bribery activities in police department who issued such licences, higher price is the only way to maximize the objective to reduce number of accidents while facing lack of law enforcement in traffic.

What do you think, guys?




4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sebuah perspektif yang sangat naif. Pernahkah terbesit di pikiran anda bahwa semua tindakan itu merupakan anti-tesis dan kulminasi dari keadaan bangsa kita saat ini? Saat Sang Kaya semakin mempertontonkan kekayaannya, maka rakyat miskin membalas mereka dengan melakukan semua itu. Mereka melakukannya untuk merebut kembali harga diri mereka.

salam,
Felix.

Anonymous said...

Not both. But provide good public transportation and cheap!. Also, the gov should subsidize it.

Berly said...

While reducing the traffic accident is a very worthy goal, there are some ways to see this topic.

Why people are riding in motorcycle in the first place?

1. They (I could not ride motorcycle, so I will use third people to refer motorcycle rider) want to get from one place to another

2. Car is too expensive (or at least more expensive) and slower in traffic jam.

3. Traffic violation is more tolerated if done by motorcycle.

Factor 1 & 2 would be well taken care by Dendi's suggestion (with adequate resources and well thought plan)

However the third one is more complicated. Policy prescription would be from reducing entry (ex: higher license fee) and easing exit (ex: three violation and your license is suspended for a year). And there is the parennial question of police and law implementation consistency

Anonymous said...

I guess the increasing of premium price yesterday should reduce the number of motorcycle. Berly said that car is too expensive, so the 'motorbikers' mostly come from middle-low class, a class with more price sensitive character (compared with middle-up class).

After all, instead of riding motorcycle, they will use public transportation since they get negative incentive to ride a motorcycle. So, the barbaric motorcycle risk can be reduced / minimized.

For Felix, I'm not sure get what you mean, but I guess your statement is questionable.

^_^