Encouraging the demons

Minister of Works Franklyn Khan acknowledges that alcohol and speed are the main reasons for the carnage on the nation’s roads. Yet, in what we take as a strange contradiction, he argues that an increased police presence on our roads would have only limited impact. He says: “I mean if five young guys want to jump in a car drunk and drink hard going to Maracas, it leaves you very limited options, except having 24-hour policing on the roads.”
      
This, in our view, is a surprising cop-out. According to our report, the police had stopped and warned the five men in the car about their reckless driving shortly before they slammed into a parked PTSC bus on the North Coast Road on Monday afternoon. Such was their speed that their car split apart on impact, three of them were killed instantly and two others seriously injured. We believe that the police, seeing the drunken state of the men, the dangerous way their car was being driven on that narrow, winding road, and realising the serious hazard they presented to themselves and other motorists, should have done more than just issue a warning. The driver should have been taken to the nearest police station and charged with dangerous driving, and the other occupants should have been sent packing.

The police, had they taken the right action, could have prevented this horrible accident, a fact which demolishes the Minister’s argument. For several years we have been calling on the government for a consistent campaign to deal with dangerous drivers, including a strategic system of police patrols on our highways. Now that we understand the Minister’s thinking we see why our advocacy has been in vain. He believes that more road patrols are not the answer as they could have “only limited impact.” Such a response, we feel sure, would only provide more encouragement for the reckless louts who flout our traffic laws with impunity, drinking, speeding and placing in danger the lives of other road users.

The North Coast crash last week Monday illustrates our point in tragic fashion. By comparison, however, bus driver Gangaram Ramlochan must be commended for his safety response when he saw the black Ford Escort coming pell mell at him, swaying from left to right across the road. He pulled his vehicle to the side and stopped. As a result, his passengers remained safe and unhurt as the oncoming car crashed into the stationary bus. The Minister’s seeming dismissal of a greater Police presence on the nation’s roads and his “little impact” comment would have been worthy of Pontius Pilate. Nobody seriously expects the government to institute 24-hour policing on our roads. But the fact is that, at present, patrols even on our highways where most serious accidents occur are virtually non-existent and the outmoded system of trapping speed demons is inconsistently used.

The Minister’s efforts to make our roads more “user friendly” — cat-eying, dualling, more signage and markings — are, of course, a welcome improvement but, as we have said repeatedly before, the gross and chronic indiscipline on our roads and the carnage it causes will only be curbed by a strict and relentless enforcement of the law. Only a strategic system of police patrols, as obtains in most developed countries, will provide this kind of enforcement. As far as the Breathalyser is concerned, it seems too much to hope that at long last it will be introduced.