It is quite disturbing to read that more than 40% of the accident victims who ended up at the emergency room of a hospital here were Malaysian motorcyclists.

Back home, Malaysian motorcyclists are a notorious lot when it comes to road safety and it appears they have taken their road culture across the Causeway.

The Sunday Times highlighted that the statistics provided by the Khoo Teck Puat Hospital indicated that the hospital had seen 865 seriously injured motorcyclists between 2011 and 2015.

“Overall, 42% of the seriously injured were Malaysians,” consultant surgeon Dr Caroline Simon was quoted as saying.

The daily also pointed out the National University Hospital (NUH) had treated 417 motorcyclists and pillion riders, including Malaysians, who suffered moderate to severe injuries from January 2014 to October 2016.

Injuries suffered by bikers on Singapore roads include bleeding in the skull, bone fractures and multiple rib fractures.

And there were damning revelations on the cause of the accidents involving Malaysian motorcyclists, as highlighted by the daily.

“At high speed, the Malaysian motorcyclists zoom past traffic, weaving across lanes, squeezing between vehicles, even speeding on road shoulders,” wrote the paper.

All this will sound familiar to Malaysian motorists.

The high number of Malaysian motorcyclists involved were also attributed to the high number of Malaysians who commute daily to Singapore on their bikes.

According to Dr Caroline, an estimated 40,000 Malaysian motorcyclists commute to Singapore daily.

She noted roughly half or 53.8% of the accidents involving Malaysian riders happened after office hours, between 6pm and 8am.

Why did the daily choose to focus on Malaysian motorcyclists when in fact Singaporeans outnumber Malaysians when speaking of the casualty numbers?

Malaysian riders have come into the spotlight because of the handful of reported road deaths from October to December 2016.

On Dec 1, the report said Malaysian Ng Boon Kong, 51, was killed in a collision with a tipper truck in Woodlands.

Eight days earlier, another Malaysian, Loh Fook Siong, 42, died in an incident near Jalan Buroh. Eye witness accounts indicated Loh was squeezing his way between two heavy vehicles when he met his tragic end.

While deaths involving Malaysian riders are understood to be not a “significant” percentage of fatalities here, the injury figures acquired by the newspaper are telling, the paper said.

“Malaysian riders need to understand that the terrain is different because Singapore is a city and not a small town,” chairman of the Singapore Road Safety Council Bernard Tay was quoted as saying.

Failure to abide by road rules in faster-flowing traffic here could be dangerous to Malaysian riders, as well as other motorists, said Tay.

“Motorcyclists get injured in traffic accidents due to collisions with the road surface, road barriers or other vehicles,” Dr Jackson Jiang, an associate consultant at the department of hand surgery, Singapore General Hospital, was quoted as saying.

The Sunday Times wrote while raising awareness on Malaysian riders is vital, equally important are enforcement measures which penalise errant motorists for dangerous road behaviour.

However, there were many occasions where Malaysians were hurt due to the recklessness of some local drivers.

A good example is the Ayer Rajah Expressway (AYE) road carnage on Dec 19, 2016 where a Malaysian couple were thrown off their bike after a Mercedes driven against the traffic flow crashed into them.

The same car crashed into several other vehicles killing one of the drivers and leaving four injured.

A video clip of the Mercedes hitting the motorbike went viral online.

There were seven incidents of motorists driving against the traffic flow between Dec 28 and Jan 7 and this is worrisome.