By Shafaat Ahmed www.khaleejtimes.com
DUBAI – A new law introduced by the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) recently has made registration of quad bikes mandatory in Dubai, while strictly confining them to off-road.
Though the registration process was first introduced in 2008, the regulations could not be implemented successfully. RTA has now come up with a revised law, making registration easier as well as exempting a category of quad bikes from the regulation process. It is also coming up with novel plans of setting up organised and secure zones for the operation of these vehicles.
“We have been working on the new system for sometime now as the earlier set of regulations did not work due to a variety of reasons. What we have done now is, we have simplified the entire process and made registration easier and cheaper,” said Ahmed Hashem Bahrozyan, CEO of RTA’s Licensing Agency, who is personally supervising the implementation of new regulations.
One of the major steps RTA has taken to get the owners in the legal purview is making the insurance of the quad bikes optional, which in effect means no insurance.
“Insuring the bikes would be optional from now, depending on the owner’s choice. This we are doing to reduce the burden on owners and attract them in the legal purview, which will help us or the police during emergency, accidents or crimes to ascertain who the owner of a particular bike is,” detailed Bahrozyan, highlighting the issues that forced RTA to make registration mandatory.
As part of the simplification steps RTA has also categorised the ‘adventure machines’ in two major divisions of less than 50cc bikes and more than 50cc bikes, exempting the former from registration. More info
