He said during the earlier part of the pandemic, there were about 12 road accident deaths per day, compared with 17 per day in 2019, but the number had begun rising again. However, he did not give the latest figures.

“A huge number of these road accident deaths involve motorcyclists,” he said.

Speaking at the nationwide road safety campaign organised by the General Insurance Association of Malaysia (PIAM) and Malaysian Takaful Association, Bakri said: “No less than 15,000 summonses are handed out in a day for all road-traffic sectors in Malaysia, but the number of deaths is still not decreasing.

“If we can tackle the target group, which are the motorcyclists, the statistics can be brought down.”

Road Transport Department director-general Zailani Hashim agreed with Bakri, adding that previously they only focused on enforcement, but not the data.

“Now that we have specific and better statistics, we can focus our enforcement in areas that record the most road accident cases,” he said.

PIAM chairman Antony Lee believes different behaviours result in different outcomes so they need to look into the demographics, age, and such to better address the issue.

Their campaign, #steadybrader focuses on youngsters by using digitalisation via games and other tech-savvy features to get them to understand and practice defensive driving.