New registrations of motorcycles soar
The number of new registrations of motor vehicles increased in the second quarter of 2017 by 22.6 percent year-on-year to 3,494, according to information released yesterday by the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC). Of this figure, motorcycle registrations (2,258) surged by 44 percent.
To put these figures into perspective, in the entire first half of 2017, new registrations of motor vehicles increased by 6 percent year- on-year to 7,256. DSEC attributed this to an increase in the number of heavy motorcycles (+21.2 percent).
At the end of June 2017, the total number of licensed motor vehicles in Macau dropped by 1.9 percent year- on-year to 243,570, however within this figure, heavy motorcycles (94,600) grew by 3 percent while light automobiles (109,500) decreased by 1.6 percent.
In the second quarter of this year, there were a total of 3,630 cases of traffic accidents and the number of victims reached 1,141. This represents an increase of 2.2 percent and 6 percent respectively year-on-year. However, in the first half of 2017, the number of traffic accidents fell by 2.9 percent year-on-year to 7,208 cases.
Cross-border vehicle traffic amounted to a total of almost 1.2 million trips in the second quarter of 2017, down considerably by 7.1 percent year-on-year. In the broader context of the first half of the year, vehicle traffic was down by 6.9 percent year-on-year, with traffic via the Border Gate dropping by more than 12 percent during those six months. However, across the same period, traffic via the Cotai Checkpoint rose by 10.5 percent.
As for non-road transport, passenger ferry movements linking Macau with Hong Kong and mainland China increased by 3.6 percent year-on-year to 34,714 trips in the second quarter. In the first six months of 2017, a total of 69,252 trips were made, an increase of 1.7 percent.
Commercial flights at the Macau International Airport totaled 13,474 in the second quarter of 2017, edging down by 0.1 percent year-on-year. In the first half-year of 2017, commercial flights decreased by three percent to 26,381.
