Roll-Over Standard: Four out of five buses may be unsafe!

The Sun yesterday revealed the news that four out of five buses that are running on Malaysian roads may be unsafe.

Risky bus rides
BY Pauline Wong

PETALING JAYA (Dec 7, 2010): Several tragic bus accidents this year have raised concerns about the vehicles’ safety standards. Shockingly, transport regulators say 80% of the more than 40,000 buses of various types plying our roads may be in breach of safety regulations.

Many of the buses on the roads are not R66 compliant.

Old buses are “recycled” into stage buses and school buses.

Road Transport Department head of automotive engineering Mohamad Dalib said it had been an uphill task getting smaller bus manufacturers to adhere to the United Nations Economic Commissions Europe (UNECE) R66 vehicle safety regulation adopted in 2007.

The R66 is a safety standard for the manufacturing of the bus body as a whole unit, not as sub-components which are welded to each other. By law, as of November 2007, all buses must comply with R66. In reality, this may be far from so.

Malaysian Institute of Road Safety Research (Miros) director-general Prof Dr Ahmad Farhan Mohd Sadullah said conventionally, buses were built locally on top of the

chassis bought from known manufacturers. “There was not much control over the quality of bus bodies until the government announced the implementation of UNECE R66 rule to ensure stronger superstructure of bus,” he told theSun.

The ruling was imposed after 22 people died in a crash at Bukit

Gantang on Aug 13, 2007 when an express bus crashed into a guardrail and plunged into a ravine.

A UNECE report on R66 based on post-accident research by Miros showed that there were critical failures to the structure of that bus, which was more than 20 years old, had been welded together. The same report also showed two other accidents in 2007 and 2008 in which 18 others died were due to failure to comply with R66.

The Commercial Vehicle Licensing Board said 41,273 bus licences have been issued to date. Of this, 33,203 were issued before 2007 and not R66-compliant.

Mohamad said high cost was the main reason many bus companies did not comply with R66. “To comply is to, quite literally, buy a whole new bus,” he said. “The entire superstructure must be replaced. The cost is RM480,000 minimum, per bus.”

Also, he said, when it came to testing for R66 compliance, it was difficult to get truthful and accurate results.

“There are two ways to test a bus for structural integrity: a rollover test and a simulation test. The roll-over test is costly and involves submitting the bus to a crash test. As for the simulation test, the results can be faked,” he said, adding that it was had for the RTD to determine the exact number of faked results.

Mohamad also explained that Malaysian buses were never truly retired. CVLB regulations state that buses older than seven years can no longer be used as express buses.

After that, most are recycled. “After seven years, express buses are turned into other types of buses, such as charter, stop-and-go, factory or school buses,” he explained.

Thus, some school buses are more than 30 years old and still ply the roads. The interior of the buses are changed or refurbished, but the structure, and safety concerns, remain.

Road Safety Department director-general Datuk Suret Singh said that one of the five codes under safety, health and environment was vehicle safety management, which encompassed the design, strength, roadworthiness of the vehicle and protection to the passenger.

“The protection zone around the passenger – the bus cabin – must be strong. In a crash, it must remain

intact to safeguard the passengers. If it collapses it will cause deaths and severe injury,” he said. — theSun

Another interview with the chief of Malaysia’s largest independent bus fleet operator paints another picture. He said all the fleets will be compliant to Europe’s R66 rollover protection standards, although we at TRANSIT knows well many of past Transnasional’s fleets were sold off as chartered/factory/school buses – and doubt exists on whether these recycled buses are built to withstand rollover crashes such as the recent Genting accident.

Good, bad and ugly
By Pauline Wong

PETALING JAYA (Dec 7, 2010): THE fact that many buses on the road are not R66 compliant does not mean they are unsafe as there were existing safety standards on the build of the buses.

Konsortium Transnasional Berhad (KTB) executive director Tengku Hasmadi Tengku Hashim said R66 is to reinforce the standards already in place by RTD and Sirim previously.

The KTB group is one of the largest bus operators in the country, with over 700 buses under the group; namely, the Transnasional, Plusliner and Nice buses.

“Nice and Transnasional were the first to comply with the Australian Design Rules (ADR, similiar to R66), from 2005. It was then followed by the Plusliner buses in 2006 with R66 standards. The Plusliner buses were produced by SKS Coach Builders, which was certified by UNECE after a live simulation test involving a real bus,” said Tengku Hasmadi.

“Only about 150 Transnasional buses are compliant with the old RTD standards; these buses are more than six years old,” he said, adding that in three years’ time, all buses under KTB will be compliant with the new standards.

“The new standards cannot be imposed or retrofitted on to the older buses because it involves the structure of the bus and is cost prohibitive,” he explained.

Tengku Hasmadi believes the problem of safety lies with the drivers.

“The standards are not the main ingredient of safety. It saves lives and reduce major injuries when accidents happen, but the key is to prevent or reduce accidents in the first place.

“The real problem is the shortage of bus drivers, and too many bus operators (more than 250 express operators alone). Therefore, the good, average and bad drivers are all gainfully employed. If one operator fires a bad driver, he (the driver) will join one of the remaining 249 operators and the cycle goes on,” he said.

Miros’ Ahmad Farhan said that there are safety codes to follow when it comes to the drivers of these buses.

The Safety, Health and Environment code of practice as imposed by CVLB in 2008 requires bus companies to have a system to manage the safety performance of drivers, failing which the company may be charged for non-compliance,” said Farhan.

To this end, Transport Deputy Minister Datuk Abdul Rahim Bakri said that all the enforcement for the rules and regulations, including compliance to R66 and driver safety, would come under the Land Public Transport Commission, which will be fully operational by early next year. — theSun

The fact that even the CEO of the largest independent bus operator in Malaysia admits the difficulty in flushing potential road killers out of the express bus labor market tells us that our regulator friends that are supposed to enforce standards within the express bus industry did not do their job well. Permits have been given purely on entrepreneurial basis, and no immediate attention has been given towards driver’s welfare (TRANSIT wonders why there is no union to protect the interests of bus drivers),  better transit network design, infrastructure and systems and transport demand management.

If only the government listens to our advice, especially on load balancing option through the usage of express/school/tour/factory buses (R66-compliant of course) for ERT routes during peak hours, we probably have a greater ‘yay’ from stakeholders on enforcing life-saving standards with immediate effect without the nagging of bus operators (for higher fares and subsidy) and users (lower fares and safer journeys). But no, RapidKL’s long haul coaches run idle most of the time, loan shark Ah Longs continues to own bus consortiums as illegal business fronts under CVLB’s noses (which explains why there are express buses running empty), and understanding in roles of independent operators have been largely ignored in our nation’s NKEA and NKRA for urban public transport and Greater KL (the only public transport improvement ‘gifts’ are MRT, MRT and MRT – after all, the 2010 NKEA urban public transport improvement target can be considered ‘achieved’ via the BET and the 4-coach LRT).

Higher fares answer to bus accidents?

By Melissa Chi and Dinesh Kumar