Kali­fa Clyne

A five-year traf­fic man­age­ment plan and the es­tab­lish­ment of a roads au­thor­i­ty are be­ing de­liv­ered to treat with safe­ty on the na­tion's roads says Works and In­fra­struc­ture Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er. Ac­cord­ing to Warn­er, the $49.92 mil­lion traf­fic man­age­ment plan was ap­proved by Cab­i­net one month ago and has al­ready be­gun. Warn­er made the rev­e­la­tion while de­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress at the In­ter­na­tion­al Road Safe­ty con­fer­ence yes­ter­day at the Crowne Plaza, Port-of-Spain. The con­fer­ence was host­ed by Jar­ic En­vi­ron­ment, Safe­ty and Health Ser­vices, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Unit­ed States Na­tion­al Safe­ty Coun­cil.

Warn­er said the first phase of the plan, which would cost $8.2 mil­lion, would deal with the up­grad­ing of roads that were in need of re­pairs. He al­so said his min­istry con­tin­ued to have dai­ly meet­ings to en­sure a roads au­thor­i­ty could be brought to fruition so that all the roads in the coun­try could come un­der one body. While Warn­er ad­mit­ted that the Gov­ern­ment need­ed to do its part to en­sure the safe­ty of the na­tion's roads, he urged pas­sen­gers to main­tain their rights when trav­el­ling with ir­re­spon­si­ble dri­vers. "If a dri­ver is go­ing too fast, you can ask him to slow down. If they talk on their phone or over­take bad­ly on the road you can ask them to stop or ex­it their ve­hi­cle," Warn­er said. He said one of his per­son­al wish­es was for heavy ve­hi­cles, such as con­tain­ers, to be re­moved from the road be­tween 6 am and 6 pm.

At the con­fer­ence, Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Dwayne Gibbs re­vealed that T&T had one of the high­est mor­tal­i­ty rates in the Caribbean as a re­sult of traf­fic col­li­sions. He added: "With 210 road fa­tal­i­ties in 2009, 206 in 2010 and 103 as of Au­gust this year, the year-end tal­ly for road deaths ri­vals the mid-year tal­ly for mur­ders in T&T. "We get out­raged for mur­ders but ig­nore or ac­cept the slaugh­ter on our road­ways." He said the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice had in­clud­ed road­way safe­ty as one of four strate­gic pri­or­i­ties and was in­volved in a sys­tems ap­proach to the de­vel­op­ment of a na­tion­al road-safe­ty plan. The con­fer­ence, which ad­dressed is­sues such as pedes­tri­an fa­tal­i­ties, col­li­sion avoid­ance and road de­sign, ends to­day.