Friday's announcement by the Minister of Works and Transport, Fitzgerald Hinds, that the Police Service will introduce speed guns on the highways and byways of T&T is a positive and welcome move that is certainly long overdue.
The introduction of the speed guns is necessary because there is little doubt that there is a connection between speeding and road traffic fatalities in this country.
Last month, Arrive Alive, the road safety NGO, released information that indicated 146 people were killed in 127 road traffic accidents last year, and that 55 per cent of those fatalities was due to speeding by drivers on the nation's roads.
And if the statistics are not damning enough, there are the photographs of crumpled cars at the sides of major roadways and too many police reports of vehicles flying over highway medians and somersaulting in mid-air before crashing into some hapless oncoming driver travelling in the opposite direction.
Police in the US have been using speed guns as an effective means of enforcing the speed limit for over 60 years and its introduction in this country has been a topic of discussion for more than two decades.
One indication of how long the introduction of speed guns has taken can be gleaned from the fact that legislation mandating the wearing of seatbelts was introduced on January 1, 1995. Even then, there were discussions about the introduction of the speed guns.
But clearly legislation is not enough. In T&T, there are laws covering the speed limit, drunk driving, the wearing of seatbelts, and the use of mobile phones while driving.
While there are few drivers or front-seat passengers who do not use seatbelts in T&T today–and many potential drunk drivers who are scared into sobriety by the use of the breathalyser–the existing laws on speeding are widely disregarded.
Clearly the problem has been the failure of the police to implement the laws of the land with regard to speeding and the lack of the means of proving in court, if necessary, that a driver was speeding.
When he piloted the latest amendment to the Motor Vehicle and Road Traffic Act in Parliament last year, former Works and Infrastructure minister Surujrattan Rambachan disclosed that there had been 21,310 speed violations of the traffic lights at the eastern end of Wrightson Road in 2014.
That was an indication of both a disregard for the speed limits and of the fact that the authorities had been conducting a pilot project on detecting speedsters at least since 2014.
It is to be hoped that having established the speeding hotspots throughout the country, that the police make effective use of this intelligence to find and fine breaches of the law.
The availability of the speed gun devices from tomorrow should provide police officers with a robust and accepted means of proving that a driver was exceeding the speed limit, which it is expected would survive the first few legal challenges.
But the speed gun is a means to an end, and not an end in itself–meaning that the police should feel free to use non-device mechanisms to stop drivers speeding. One quite effective way is to pull the speeding driver over and simply make them wait at the side of the roadway for a suitably punitive period of time.
Finally, while the introduction of the speed guns are lauded, the failure of the authorities to implement traffic-light cameras linked to an operational network in the Motor Vehicle Authority that has a means of tracing every car on T&T's roads is regretted.
In lamenting one more horrific fatal road traffic accident last year, Arrive Alive offered condolences to the families of the victims lost on the nations' roads, adding: "Although each one of us is responsible for our own safety we are devastated at the fact that preventable measures and technology have not been put in place to avoid this carnage."