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mar Ghofur, 34, learned the cost of recklessness in riding a motorcycle in Greater Jakarta when his teenage son, Teddy, was involved in a traffic accident while riding a motorcycle with a classmate in Depok, West Java, last year.

Umar said Wednesday that he would have prohibited Teddy, a 10th grader, to go out if he had known that his son was going to drive a motorcycle without wearing a helmet and against the traffic flow.

'€œLater that day, a neighbor told me that my son and a friend had been hit by another motorcycle and were being treated in the hospital,'€ he told The Jakarta Post.

Teddy was just one of millions in Greater Jakarta who owns a motorcycle, with Jakarta Police Traffic Directorate data showing there were 13.1 million motorcycles in Greater Jakarta at the end of 2014. The data also revealed that 4,000 to 4,500 new motorcycles hit the city'€™s road each day.

The strikingly high number is spurred by a government policy that allows people to buy a motorcycle with a down payment as low as Rp 400,000 (US$30).

The rising number of motorcycles in Jakarta, however, has yet to be followed by an awareness of the need to comply with road regulations.

Despite the high number of fatal accidents that occur every year, motorcyclists rarely consider safety as an important issue when driving. Not wearing a helmet, text messaging or making phone calls while driving, running counter to the flow of traffic or carrying more than one passenger are all common practices.

Angga Triaji, who rides a motorcycle daily to reach his office in South Jakarta, admitted that when he was in a hurry, he sometimes '€œcarefully'€ ran a red light, but argued that it was a normal thing to do in Jakarta.

'€œIn my hometown in Semarang [Central Java] almost no one runs a red light, but here, there have been times when I was the only motorcyclist waiting for the light to turn green,'€ he said.

Jakarta Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Muhammad Iqbal said more traffic violations were committed by motorcyclists than any other motorists. During a recent traffic discipline operation carried out by the Jakarta Police, of the 31,084 traffic tickets issued in the first five days of the operation, 22,164 were for motorcyclists.

The high number of violations raised the question of whether the motorcyclists deserved driver'€™s licenses, or how they got them in the first place.

Many people see the driver'€™s license office as corrupt. Applicants often pay officers additional charges and illegal middlemen benefit from applicants not wanting to wait in line.

Ronald Lelepadang, 29, a marketing staff member, said he decided to obtain his driver'€™s license through an unofficial channel after failing a driving test at Tangerang Police headquarters last year.

'€œIt was quite odd because I always safely passed the traffic in Ciledug, Tangerang, Banten, where traffic is known as the Jakarta cowboy'€™s route for its terrible condition, for years,'€ he said over the phone, adding that during the test he rode a motorcycle that was in poor condition provided by the police.

A week later, he returned to the police office to retake the test. He was welcomed by a police officer who took him into a test room and explained the meaning of road signs. The officer did not make him take the test.

'€œMaybe he didn'€™t want to just let me pass it without having any knowledge about the signs or driving,'€ he said, adding that he was issued a driver'€™s licence that day for Rp 400,000, more than the official fee of Rp 150,000. (prm)