PETALING JAYA: The country’s first motorcycle e-hailing service, Dego Ride, has urged the government to look into the proof of concept trial the company carried out last year before deciding its stance on motorcycle e-hailing services in Malaysia.
While a six-month trial that started in January 2020 was cut short due to the Covid-19 outbreak two months later, Dego Ride founder Nabil Feisal Bamadhaj believes that the data from the study should be referenced when considering motorcycle e-hailing services based on safety issues.
He said that the 4,000 riders he had at the time carried out 10-15 trips a day, making for around 40,000 to 60,000 trips over the two-month period.
“There were zero deaths over those two months, and although there were five accidents, none of them involved trips with pillion riders,” he said.
“The accidents that we had were instances where our riders weren’t at fault. This data has already been passed to the Land Public Transport Agency (Apad) and the Malaysian Institute of Road Safety Research (Miros), but we believe they didn’t refer to it.
“The data is already there. So, why isn’t the government looking into it?”
According to Nabil, apart from measuring the number of people who used their services to travel from home to work and vice versa, the trial also identified locations where the public had first and last mile connectivity issues when using public transport such as LRT, MRT and KTM to and from home.
He said that he has not gotten any reply from both Apad and the transport ministry despite contacting them over the outcome of the two-month trial his company had carried out on motorcycle e-hailing services.
FMT has reached out to Apad for comment.
Nabil was commenting on deputy transport minister Henry Sum Agong’s statement in the Dewan Rakyat on Monday that there are no plans to introduce motorcycle e-hailing services in Malaysia as road fatalities among motorcyclists are still high.
Replying to a question from Larry Sng (Ind-Julau) on the progress of the government’s plan to introduce the service as announced in 2019, Henry said that the decision was based on 2019 police statistics in which 64% of the total 6,100 road fatalities that year involved motorcyclists.
For Nabil, though, the two-month trial should be enough to prove that the data which Henry cited was not the best way to decide whether to introduce motorcycle e-hailing services or not.
“I totally disagree because we already have this data from the trial. Apart from that, they are not providing a solution other than saying ‘stop this service’,” said Nabil.
“Obviously, I came into this knowing that people would be on the lookout for riders who flout the law.
“But I only employ riders who toe the line and don’t ride riskily. All my riders have also been screened for traffic and criminal offences.”
Dego Ride, which started out in July 2015 and was forced to stop two years later after similar road safety concerns, currently operates as a motorcycle delivery service provider.
While the then Pakatan Harapan government had plans to boost job opportunities for the B40 youth by giving motorcycle e-hailing services the green light, the move was later shelved due to safety concerns. - FMT
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