If the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port want­ed to re­view where this coun­try cur­rent­ly stands on the ef­fi­cient road net­works and trans­port flow is­sue, events yes­ter­day pro­vid­ed a good ba­sis on which to start.

Tens of thou­sands faced grid­lock traf­fic span­ning dozens of miles across north­ern, west­ern and cen­tral com­mu­ni­ties, most­ly stem­ming from two ma­jor in­ci­dents, one be­ing a fall­en tree on the La­dy Young Road and the oth­er in­volv­ing a bro­ken-down truck un­der the Ch­agua­nas Fly­over.

Both in­ci­dents oc­curred dur­ing the time most schools were be­ing dis­missed and con­tin­ued in­to the af­ter­noon rush hour traf­fic pe­ri­od, caus­ing may­hem for com­muters.

This, of course, is a time when more peo­ple are us­ing the roads, with scores of fetes and oth­er Car­ni­val events and prepa­ra­tions tak­ing place.

This is com­pound­ed by the use of more trucks and large trans­port ve­hi­cles used to car­ry equip­ment to these events, oc­cu­py­ing more space on the roads.

The Hilton Trinidad ho­tel is al­so be­ing used this week as the Bliss Car­ni­val band's dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­tre be­tween the hours of 12 noon and 8 pm, which on­ly added to the num­ber of peo­ple need­ing to use the La­dy Young Road yes­ter­day.

With the La­dy Young and high­way af­fect­ed, the re­sult was a re­peat of what we have seen in the past, clogs in traf­fic from the Au­drey Jef­fers High­way head­ing west to crawl­ing speeds on the Uri­ah But­ler High­way's south­bound lane.

The con­ges­tion around the Queen's Park Sa­van­nah was so bad that some com­muters com­plained of spend­ing over 90 min­utes to tra­verse 100 me­tres.

This once again rais­es a crit­i­cal con­cern about our fail­ure to de­vel­op a prop­er emer­gency traf­fic plan from the cap­i­tal city and around the ma­jor towns and dis­tricts.

Since the shelv­ing of the mass tran­sit plan in the form of a rapid rail by the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment in Sep­tem­ber 2010, and again by the PNM Gov­ern­ment in 2016 af­ter it was reini­ti­at­ed, there has been lit­tle to of­fer in terms of ef­fec­tive al­ter­na­tives to the avail­able traf­fic routes and op­tions.

And al­though the wa­ter taxi sys­tem has been well pa­tro­n­ised, its non­stop route from Port-of-Spain to San Fer­nan­do means that the hun­dreds of thou­sands who live be­tween the two cities still utilise road trans­porta­tion as their pre­ferred op­tion.

On count­less oc­ca­sions, flood­ing, road ac­ci­dents and po­lice road ex­er­cis­es were all that were nec­es­sary to cre­ate ma­jor grid­locks for hours across the coun­try.

It is time that the Gov­ern­ment re­vis­it the coun­try's traf­fic man­age­ment sys­tem, as the num­ber of ve­hi­cles on the roads con­tin­ues to climb with 100 per cent loan op­tions be­ing pro­vid­ed by sev­er­al banks.

These traf­fic night­mares, such as the one yes­ter­day, are dry runs that have ex­posed our weak­ness­es in the event of any ma­jor dis­as­ter that re­quires the quick evac­u­a­tion of the city.

Among the main roles of the Min­istry's Traf­fic Man­age­ment Branch, is to en­sure a safe and ef­fi­cient move­ment of goods and peo­ple through the road net­work with­in the ex­ist­ing in­fra­struc­ture.

Judg­ing from yes­ter­day's chaos, we most cer­tain­ly have a lot of work to do to achieve this ob­jec­tive.