There will always be road-traffic accidents. The capabilities of powerful vehicles, the failings of human beings and auto mechanisms and the congested state of this country's roads conspire to ensure that crashes and near-misses will continue to be with us for sometime. Truly horrific stories like that of Brian and Savitri Bovell who were out for a Sunday afternoon drive this weekend, only to be killed when a panel van jumped the median and crashed head on into their car, serve to remind us of the deadly imponderables at play whenever we roll out onto the road. Prof Ramesh Deosaran delivered to the Transport Minister a proposal for improving road safety in May 2007. Among the findings in the 80-page proposal is the assertion that according to available data for the Caribbean, 69 per cent of all victims of traffic injuries had blood alcohol concentrations of over 50 per cent. Of those, 55 per cent had a blood alcohol concentration of .08 or greater, over the legal limit in Trinidad and Tobago.
On Wednesday evening, breathalyser tests snagged 11 drivers returning from the Caura River for drunk driving. Officers returned to Caura Royal Road on Sunday morning and snagged another 11 offenders between 8 am and 11 am on their way to the river to begin their outings. Aside from pre-emptively saving lives, the commendable diligence over the Easter weekend of police officers-who also ticketed 279 people for road-safety infractions on Friday night alone-only served to underscore the road-safety problem that we face. This action against drunk drivers is commendable, but overall, road accident rates remain unsatisfactory, and enforcement, except for these isolated success stories, is still far too spotty and inconsistent to drive the kind of cultural change necessary to improve road safety. In a Sunday Guardian interview, Commissioner of Police Dwayne Gibbs spoke of the need for action on the elements of road-safety success to proceed in tandem. In his hometown of Alberta, Canada, the CoP noted that the process "required a systemic approach to traffic safety engineering, roads, education and awareness, and policing. "It required all the ministries, transport, education and works to come together in a cohesive manner and work with NGOs. It is now implemented."
In the WHO 2009 global status report on road safety, Canada recorded 2,889 road related deaths in a country with 20,065,000 vehicles, a ratio of .00014 deaths per automobile. Trinidad and Tobago, with 214 recorded deaths and a vehicle count of 490,987, had a ratio of .00043, almost three times as high. Commissioner Gibbs would like to see demerit systems and licence suspensions introduced for road safety infractions, but has acknowledged that he needs to start with changing the most prominent tool at his disposal-the antiquated handwritten system for tickets. What else is Canada doing differently? For one thing, road safety is important enough that it has got its own directorate, a division of the governance body, Transport Canada, which executes the mandates of Canada's Motor Vehicle Safety Act. Road safety in this country falls under the Ministry of Transport, but its importance needs to be elevated to the action-focused level of a division of the ministry. A division of road safety would lead initiatives for managing road incidents, analysing records of road incidents for actionable patterns, and developing projects to improve public safety and reduce dangerous driving. It might also act as an information gathering and co-ordinating resource to stamp out dangerous irregularities in existing systems such as overly lax granting of driver's licenses. Road safety will improve when it's taken seriously, beginning with Cabinet-level attention, expressed in effective, focused policing and embraced as social standards of behaviour through effective public-education campaigns.