Rashan­da Mc Ken­na

Trinidad and To­ba­go has the sec­ond high­est road fa­tal­i­ty fig­ure in the world. This shock­ing rev­e­la­tion was made by An­gela Francke, Ger­man trans­porta­tion psy­chol­o­gist from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Dres­den. The fig­ures, Francke stat­ed, were ap­prox­i­mate­ly 200 deaths a year, which means that with­in a six-month pe­ri­od 100 Trin­bag­o­ni­ans die in road ac­ci­dents.

In 2008, there were 214 road fa­tal­i­ties-77 per cent were males and 23 per cent were fe­males, ac­cord­ing a World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO) re­port. The traf­fic ex­pert al­so re­port­ed that the ma­jor­i­ty of crash vic­tims were not the oc­cu­pants of mo­torised ve­hi­cles, but pedes­tri­ans, mo­tor­cy­clists, bi­cy­clists.

Francke said: "This prob­lem is large­ly due to the fact that road safe­ty is not tak­en se­ri­ous­ly by most dri­vers in T&T." Her re­port stat­ed that four-wheel­ers ac­count­ed for 34 per cent of pedes­tri­an road fa­tal­i­ties and 28 per cent of pas­sen­ger deaths. She com­pared these fig­ures to the Unit­ed States, as she stat­ed four wheel­ers ac­count­ed for 31 per cent of the road fa­tal­i­ties.

Francke re­marked: "T&T is much small­er in pro­por­tion to the US, and the fa­tal­i­ty risk fac­tor is 15.4 fa­tal­i­ties per 100,000 of the pop­u­la­tion for T&T." She in­di­cat­ed that the risk fac­tor is not the high­est world­wide, "but con­sid­er­ing the small pop­u­la­tion, it is ridicu­lous­ly high." She added: "World Bank Sta­tis­tics named Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean as the re­gions that cur­rent­ly hold the record for the high­est per capi­ta road traf­fic fa­tal­i­ty rate of any re­gion in the world."

T&T was stream­lined as hav­ing the high­est traf­fic fa­tal­i­ty rate in the Caribbean for the past sev­en years, which placed this coun­try sec­ond in the world. Francke at­trib­uted this part­ly to the fact that T&T has one of the high­est num­ber of reg­is­tered ve­hi­cles and car oc­cu­pan­cy per house­hold, world­wide.

She cit­ed a study com­plet­ed by WHO which stat­ed that over 90 per cent of the world's road fa­tal­i­ties oc­cur in low-in­come and mid­dle-in­come coun­tries, which on­ly had 48 per cent of the world's ve­hi­cles. "In T&T, road safe­ty laws are plen­ti­ful, yet en­force­ment is low. On a scale of ze­ro to ten, where ten mea­sured most ef­fec­tive, T&T was rat­ed at two for en­force­ment of drink­ing and dri­ving and speed lim­it laws by WHO," Francke added.

She said: "It is im­por­tant to en­force laws once they are es­tab­lished as they have the ob­jec­tive high num­bers of road fa­tal­i­ties. There should be train­ing of the po­lice staff, about the high lev­el of se­ri­ous­ness of this is­sue." Francke stressed the need for more work to be done to deal with road safe­ty in T&T. She said crash­es may cost ap­prox­i­mate­ly three per cent of a coun­try's an­nu­al Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct so there is eco­nom­ic cause for con­cern in ad­di­tion to loss of lives.

She said there should be prop­er im­ple­men­ta­tion of a road safe­ty plan, in­sti­tu­tion­al safe­ty and re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, prop­er mon­i­tor­ing and eval­u­a­tion, pub­lic safe­ty and road ed­u­ca­tion pro­grammes, and main­tain­ing high­er ve­hi­cle stan­dards in ad­di­tion to prop­er en­force­ment of road traf­fic laws.