I wasn’t there when the crash happened, but the dashcam video of the UPSI student bus online was very hard to watch. It captured the bus going too fast on a dark, winding part of the East–West Highway near Gerik, then losing balance and flipping over for everyone to see.
After the accident, 15 students from UPSI, between 21 and 23 years old, lost their lives, and 33 more were hurt—some were on the bus and a family of four was in a Perodua Alza MPV. The scene looked very busy: cars had been turned over, firefighters were running around, and the dashcam acted as a witness.
The most striking fact for me was that witnesses claimed the driver didn’t slow down, even when people begged him to do so. The video from that moment displays the terrible combination of speed, tiredness, and bad decisions all together.
What Comes Next:
- The authorities are using the dashcam video and are interviewing the owner of the vehicle.
- The Transport Minister has instructed a full review of the bus operator and urged for tougher safety measures as required by the Land Public Transport Act and Road Transport Act.
- Sultan Nazrin from Perak urged that the crash should prompt immediate steps to improve road safety.
- Because of the tragedy, the ministry is thinking about making dashcams and seatbelt sensors mandatory on heavy vehicles, mainly buses.
The crash happened not by chance—it showed that the system was failing. The situation was made worse by narrow roads, dim lighting, sleepy drivers, and not enough enforcement.
I think that 15 young lives lost deserves more attention than just a news headline. It needs to serve as a major change. If having dashcams, enforcing bedtime rules for drivers, or checking seatbelts can save one person, we should have done it yesterday.
This is not only about shocking the public—it also urges us to make roads, cars, enforcement, and training better.
Ian Low (junianlow6@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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