PUTRAJAYA, Nov 11 — In his parting words to the Transport Ministry, Anthony Loke today urged the Road Transport Department to continue its “war” against overloading in commercial vehicles even after he leaves as transport minister.
Loke, who effectively resigned as transport minister yesterday, said there would be people cheering that the minister who refused to compromise on overloading, and who they felt interfered with their livelihood, was gone.
“‘The minister has left, we can overload again like in the past, no problem,’” he said in his 48-minute speech at the Transport Ministry here, describing how overloaders would feel.
“I want JPJ to prove them wrong. This war on overloading will be continued, with or without me,” he said, using the Malay abbreviation for Road Transport Department by which it is better known locally.
“This is not an issue of minister, this is an issue of human lives. This is not an issue of livelihood, this is an issue of human lives,” he said.
He said whoever succeeds him as minister, and whoever becomes JPJ director-general, must carry on the mission without delay or softening, because it is vital for road safety.
He urged JPJ enforcement officers to act against overloading, illegal racing and speeding, which he said cause road accidents and deaths, noting that the law had been amended to give JPJ enforcement powers over such offences.
Looking back at his tenure as transport minister from December 2022 to yesterday, Loke said two fatal road accidents within a few weeks had left a huge psychological impact on him.
“I feel very guilty, why we cannot avoid such an incident,” he said.
He said so many innocent lives, including youths and students, were lost that he asked whether something could not have been done to prevent such a tragedy, after which the ministry pursued multiple new road safety policies, initiatives and measures.
The accidents he referred to were the May 13, 2025 collision in Teluk Intan between an overloaded lorry and a Federal Reserve Unit truck that killed nine personnel, and the June 9, 2025 crash of a chartered bus along the Gerik-Jeli East-West Highway that killed 15 Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris students.
He urged whoever holds the post to make road safety the ministry’s main agenda in policy, measures and law, saying it would be unforgivable not to pursue it wholeheartedly.
Anthony Loke urged his successor at the Transport Ministry to make policies on road safety that focuses on curbing fatalities. — File picture by Farhan Najib Earlier today at the ministry’s monthly assembly, Deputy Transport Minister Datuk Hasbi Habibollah said the ministry’s declared war on overloaded commercial vehicles meant a lot to him, and that he had told Loke so personally.
“I worked at the Public Works Department previously for 22 years, many of my roads were damaged because of overloading,” he said.
He said millions of ringgit had been spent repairing the damaged roads, and that overloading had also caused accidents.
Hasbi said that as a government officer he had previously fought overloading as a mere battle, and was glad when Loke declared it a war, which he said meant a lot for the people.
Continue FLYsiswa subsidies for students’ flights forever, Loke urges
Among other things, Loke highlighted achievements during his tenure, including the digitalisation of JPJ’s services and the JPJeBid system for bidding on vehicle number plates.
He credited JPJ’s internal JPJeBid team with devising the online bidding system since 2018, during his first stint as transport minister, saying it had become both a good source of government revenue and a way of increasing transparency for users.
Loke also pointed to the FLYsiswa flight ticket subsidy for university students travelling between Peninsular Malaysia and Sabah and Sarawak, which he said the ministry “created out of nothing” because it had never existed in the government budget.
He said the ministry started it without any allocation or injection from the Finance Ministry, funding it boldly with proceeds from the sale of special vehicle number plates.
He said the Finance Ministry recognised the initiative in subsequent years, and it is now a line item in the annual Budget, which makes it permanent for as long as the ministry continues the policy.
Noting that the ministry started with a RM300 subsidy that has since risen to RM400, Loke said the amount may seem small but is meaningful help for families who could not afford flights to send their children to university.
“I always stress, what we do in the Transport Ministry, we must remember we are Transport Ministry for Malaysia, not just Transport Ministry for the peninsula,” he said.
Loke said policies must be inclusive of Malaysians in Sabah and Sarawak, which was the spirit behind FLYsiswa, adding that he hoped it would continue “forever” in what was his final speech at a Transport Ministry monthly assembly.
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