Malaysia Highway Road Surface

For the last few days I've been driving around due to work situation and at the same time there had been heavy rains during the afternoon period. I found out one thing about our highway's road surface, which is a course of concern I think.

I used to studied in UK for several years, and comparing theirs to ours, I think our road surface is not really safe to drive during heavy downpoour. I noticed there will be water accumulated on the road surface, and there tends to have patchy water around the road surface here and there.

This will cause vehicles to losing control when driving over it, especially those with a tyres thread used more than 30% or so. Vehicles will float on the water patch area, and drivers will lose control of the vehicle during that particular period of time. If an inexperience driver hit the brake or steer the wheel somehow off direction, car will be carried away without their control.

I notice these road surface are caused by the smooth surface, which under normal hot sunny days, it will create less noise into the vehicle cabin, therefore a more comfortable ride. As compared to Europe's road surface, they tends to laid it more rough, and will create more noise when driving on it, but this will increase the rate of water dispersion.

Europe's weather as we know is a 4-season weather, which will have mist and fog anytime of the year, which will caused road surface to be slippery. Especially during winter time, road tends to be more slippery because there will be a thin layer of ice on the road surface, which is very dangerous to drive on it. With the rough surface, water tends to flow out faster and thus less water accumulation on road surface.

Smooth surface tends to cause a longer braking distance for all vehicles than rough surface. Smooth surface will give less friction between road surface and tyre, which when brake is hit hard, it will jammed the wheel rotation easier than those in rough surface, which has a higher friction.

Overall, Malaysia is having a very nice infrastructure of road building but in it we will find some danger of it because we would want a more comfort ride. Now I am finding a rough road surfacce is better during heavy downpour.