The Works Ministry through the Public Works Department (JKR) has promised to repair potholes within 24 hours. According to the Ministry, this will be conducted through the “Aku Janji Zero Potholes” campaign that was reintroduced several months ago.
The zero pothole pledge was made during a ceremony attended by Minister of Works, Dato’ Sri Haji Fadillah Bin Haji Yusof, along with concession companies. The pledge was broadcasted live via Facebook on 3rd July 2020. It promised to ensure that all federal and state roads under the administration of the JKR are free from potholes.
It was reported the previous zero pothole campaign had ran from 2016 to 2018 and was aimed at strengthening the ministry’s commitment towards the maintenance of roads in the country. It was an initiative that ran together with JKR and six concession holders for federal roads in Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah, Sarawak and Labuan.
According to the statement, potholes will be repaired under 24 hours of its discovery or complaints. However, for permanent repairs, it will take 3 days as stated in the Federal Road Maintenance contract. It defined pothole damage as holes with a diameter of 200 to 1,000 mm.
For potholes with a diameter of less than 200mm, it will be filled immediately with no cutting required. For larger potholes until 1,000mm, road cutting is required before filling. Meanwhile, potholes that exceed 1,000mm are considered as pavement failure.
The Works Ministry has allocated RM1.09 billion for federal road maintenance throughout the country which include electricity, traffic lights and street lamp bills for 2021. Under Budget 2021, RM100 million was approved for the implementation of ‘Weigh-In-Motion‘ to overcome the problem of vehicles carrying heavy loads which can indirectly damage the road.
The statement added that they will cooperate with the Transport Ministry to ensure that road surfaces are not easily damaged due to overloading of vehicles. It said they are also committed to ensure every complaint received is resolved as soon as possible without regarding the status of the complainant and to practice No Wrong Door policy for the benefit of Malaysians.
The Ministry shared that a total of 4,091 public infrastructure complaints were received by the ministry and the works department until 30th November and 1,473 of them are regarding damaged roads. Based on monitoring and patrols by JKR, they have found and repaired almost 200,000 potholes in 2019 and a total of 64,000 potholes were recorded with action taken as of June 2020.
A few days ago, the works department has shared 11 ways for road users to report potholes which are pretty tedious which include snail mail and writing to news portals. Oddly, social media wasn’t listed despite its immediate twitter response to the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Khairy Jamaluddin after he was injured in a cycling accident due to a pothole in Banting, Selangor.
The state of Selangor has utilised Waze since 2017 to receive and monitor public complaints of potholes. It was reported that over 100,000 pothole complaints were reported through Waze between August 2017 to June 2020, and 69.51% of them have been repaired. Instead of getting road users to report manually, the Works Ministry and the JKR should tap onto Waze which has a large community to provide crowd source data about potholes.
[ SOURCE, IMAGE SOURCE ]
