Interview by Yuki Lei
Macau New Chinese Youth Association Deputy Executive Director Chester Ku Heng Cheong has urged the government to improve pedestrian traffic and tackle jaywalking, while also enhancing its awareness campaigns for traffic safety.
With the gradual recovery of the community from the three-year-long COVID-19 pandemic, the increasing number of tourists and residents violating Macau’s road rules has sparked concerns on social media.
During an interview with The Macau Post Daily late last month near the Santo Agostinho bus stop, Ku, a member of the government-appointed Traffic Consultative Council, pointed out that Macau is a city with a well-developed tourism industry, adding that the number of tourists visiting Macau had decreased due to the COVID-19 pandemic over the past three years and, therefore, “conflicts” between vehicles and pedestrians had also decreased.
Concerning visitors from places such as the mainland who are not familiar with Macau’s traffic laws and driving rules, Ku urged the government to ensure road users’ safety vis-à-vis the bounce-back of tourism with the help of “publicity, education and penalties”.
According to Ku, considering that people nowadays can easily find travel-related information on social media platforms, as a first step in targeting mainland tourists, the government should launch online publicity and media campaigns to share important road safety messages both here and in the mainland alongside official tourism information, educating tourists about Macau’s road traffic environment.
The second step, Ku said, was the need for the government to collect data about traffic accident blackspots areas for analysis, which could determine whether the areas have been equipped with enough facilities for pedestrians by analysing the occurrence of jaywalking there, adding that apart from increasing the penalties for jaywalking, it would be more important to conduct a more comprehensive review on whether there are any optimisation measures targeting different traffic accident blackspots.
In view of the fact that many riders and drivers are complaining about the local police rarely punishing pedestrians for jaywalking, Ku urged the government to follow the example of Hong Kong or other places to hold territory-wide pedestrian road safety campaigns, so as to strengthen anti-jaywalking measures, thereby letting pedestrians know that they face penalties for breaching traffic rules.
“Netizens would be a good support for the police to enforce the law”, said Ku, who pointed out that in addition to monitoring incidences of jaywalking regularly on the internet, the police could also randomly carry out patrols in some key districts with a high incidence of jaywalking and tourists taking photos while standing in the middle of the road.
“Do we have to put up a sign when someone deliberately crosses the road illegally or when a tourist steps out onto the road to take photos?”, asked Ku, who admitted that this was a debatable point, but for the time being, the government should mainly place emphasis on publicity and persuasion to tackle jaywalking and other traffic violations by pedestrians.
From another perspective, “I think it is difficult to say whether the existing legislation provides too much protection for pedestrians and too little protection for motorists”, said Ku, who added he believed that the legislation was definitely drawn up after careful deliberation by all parties, and the government must have taken into account the interests of the traffic situation’s different stakeholders, i.e., motorists and pedestrians.
Macau New Chinese Youth Association Deputy Executive Director Chester Ku Heng Cheong, a member of the government-appointed Traffic Consultative Council, poses after an interview with The Macau Post Daily near the Santo Agostinho bus stop on June 30. – Photo: Yuki Lei
