Local Authorities Blacklisting Ops with RTD a fraud against the public?
It is an observed fact that these Authorities approve shop lot planning with car park to shop ratios that invariably will ensure that the car parks provided will ALWAYS be grossly insufficient for the public.
By Frustrated
Sitting in a coffee shop discussing headlines in various news media that the Road Transport Department is ready to help local governments with unpaid traffic related compound fines by blacklisting defaulters, I wondered aloud and asked my regular kopi kakis why road users should be so recalcitrant.
The consensus came as a shock. The reason why road users refuse to pay traffic compounds issued by the local authorities, according to my regular kopi kakis is simple: Unlike police traffic summonses, they regard the traffic tickets issued as a fraud against road users!
What these road users have suspected for quite some time is that Local Authorities such as DBKL, MPPJ and MPAJ regard traffic fines and compounds to be an important source of revenue to them. This is borne out by the fact that DBKL alone claims to have RM160 Million in unpaid fines. If we add in the paid compounds and fines, the figure must be staggering! Add in all the Local Authorities in the country and the figure runs into more than half a billion ringgit, which in turn will burgeon into billions of ringgit when we add in the paid portion of their traffic compounds and fines!
It is an observed fact that these Authorities approve shop lot planning with car park to shop ratios that invariably will ensure that the car parks provided will ALWAYS be grossly insufficient for the public. This can be borne out by taking a casual drive to any part of town or housing estate with shop lots in Kuala Lumpur or Petaling Jaya or any city in the country. You can drive around for the car park lots again and again and in all likelihood will not find a proper vacant lot as the planning department has ensured that the car park to shop lot ratio is insufficient. What makes it worse is that these Local Authorities carry out car park delineation exercises from time to time, removing a sizable portion of available parking lots. What this is tantamount to is that the Local Authorities are in effect, encouraging the commission of a parking offense and worse, is committing a fraud against the public!
When I ponder the actions of the Tunisian street hawker, Mohamed Bouazizi who was so depressed by constant harassment by his local City Hall officials who had time and again confiscated his hawker stall, that he set himself on fire, lighting a fuse that sparked a region wide revolutionary explosion that toppled Tunisian strongman President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and also President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, I can’t help but think that it is precisely such actions that destroys the legitimacy of Local Governments and governments by extension, in the eyes of the people.
In the circumstances, I call upon the government to require all Local Authorities and their planning departments to ensure that car parks are made available according to a fair and equitable ratio before they are able to impose compounds and fines. All previous compounds and fines should be extinguished until a fair and equitable ratio is established and a just solution is found.
