The lat­est ve­hi­cle smash-up on the Churchill-Roo­sevelt High­way, which claimed the lives of four peo­ple and has left Jus­tice Wen­dell Kan­ga­loo in a crit­i­cal con­di­tion must be the fi­nal straw. We can­not al­low this car­nage to con­tin­ue; de­ci­sive ac­tion has to be tak­en.

The place to start is at the Li­cens­ing Of­fice. The rea­son is that the ve­hi­cles of to­day are more pow­er­ful and made of soft­er ma­te­ri­als than those of yes­ter­year and can be more dan­ger­ous than a loaded gun, es­pe­cial­ly when dri­ven by an in­ex­pe­ri­enced dri­ver re­turn­ing from a night of par­ty­ing.

On­ly when this agency has been cleaned up will de­vis­es such as traf­fic cam­eras be­come ef­fec­tive and a ve­hi­cle's reg­is­tra­tion can be traced. It would be in­ter­est­ing to find out how many of the dri­vers in­volved in ac­ci­dents over the past, say, 12 months have ac­tu­al­ly passed their dri­ving test or just paid for it, which is a very pop­u­lar prac­tice, or how many of the cars in­volved it these ac­ci­dents were road wor­thy and prop­er­ly li­censed.

Any­one hav­ing to go to this Li­cens­ing Of­fice for any­thing comes out of there dis­gust­ed with the lack of ser­vice and the at­ti­tude of the em­ploy­ees. Re­mem­ber when the Post Of­fice was pri­va­tised how the ser­vice im­proved? Well the same should be done with Li­cens­ing.

An of­fi­cer is­su­ing a per­mit to a dri­ver who has failed the test or li­cens­ing an il­le­gal ve­hi­cle is no dif­fer­ent to some­one com­mit­ting a mur­der and should be treat­ed as such. I sin­cere­ly wish that Jus­tice Kan­ga­loo re­cov­ers from his un­for­tu­nate ac­ci­dent and it can be used as the cat­a­lyst to jump-start some ac­tion to im­prove road safe­ty in T&T.

Richard Tre­strail

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