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Denpasar. Following a spate of deadly road accidents involving public buses, the Transportation Ministry ordered on Tuesday authorities in the regions hardest hit to conduct safety audits of public transportation.

“They should be started in regions with a high frequency of accidents, such as East Java. The other regions are expected to follow in the coming weeks,” Deputy Transport Minister Bambang Susantono said in Bali.

He said the audits’ purpose would be to comprehensively ascertain the roadworthiness of bus companies’ buses, as well as ensure that all company drivers were in proper condition to operate their vehicles.

He said teams from the ministry’s regional offices were also ordered to immediately begin conducting spot checks on buses and drivers at public transportation terminals.

The ministry, Bambang said, also asked for the obligatory annual physical roadworthiness checks on public transportation to be conducted more strictly.

“If so far the supervision of these checks are only by the regional authorities, in the future, the central government will also get involved,” he said without elaborating.

The annual roadworthiness checks have been criticized as a mere administrative formality, where owners simply register their vehicles and pay an examination fee with little actual scrutiny of the vehicles involved.

In the past week alone, at least 28 people were killed in three bus accidents in West Java.

Meanwhile, police said they were able to identify the four fatalities of an accident that involved a public intercity bus in Ngawi, East Java, on Monday.

A speeding intercity bus that had left Surabaya bound for Yogyakarta swerved sharply to avoid a turning truck and struck a roadside tree.

Besides the four fatalities, scores of passengers were also injured in the incident.

The driver, David Doda, 40, is being detained and will face criminal charges.

On Monday, a lawmaker warned that unless the laws on traffic were strictly implemented, especially on the issuance of driving licenses for public transportation drivers, the death toll in traffic accidents could soar to 65,000 in 2020 from some 48,000 in 2010.

With 1,547 people already killed in 9,884 road accidents this year, authorities and transportation industry experts are pointing to weak implementation of the law as the main culprit.

Lawmaker Abdul Hakim, who drafted the 2009 Road Traffic Law, said weak implementation of the traffic law, which requires public transportation drivers to undergo specific training before receiving a license, was behind the recent series of deadly road accidents.

He called on police to impose a tighter watch over the proper issuance of licenses for public transportation drivers.