TACKLING ACCIDENTS

THE frightening increase in road fatalities for the year, including those caused recently, which claimed the lives of five young men on three of the country's main roads — the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway, the Solomon Hochoy Highway and the Mayaro-Guayaguayare Road — calls for greater vigilance by the Police on the nation's highways.

The lack of a sustained Police Mobile Patrol presence; alcohol, souped up car engines, defective tyres and a reluctance of passengers to insist to speeding drivers that they should slow down are some of the contributory factors in the shocking upsurge in fatal and other serious vehicular accidents. The Trinidad and Tobago Police Service has more cars registered and assigned to it than at any other time in its history, yet finding a Police Traffic Branch vehicle patrolling the nation's main roads is almost as difficult as getting the United States to provide a plausible reason for its invasion of and ongoing war against Iraq.

All too often passengers are reluctant to tell drivers to slow down for fear of inviting derision from other passengers. They forget that they have an even greater responsibility for their own safety than do the drivers, and should be prepared to demand that the drivers stop the cars and allow them to get out, if they are unwilling to slow down. In turn, persons who have gone to a function or an outing where the operators of vehicles transporting them are either clearly under the influence of alcohol, or if not visibly influenced, yet are known to have taken enough alcoholic drinks to impair their judgment, should advise against their driving. And instead suggest that persons in the group who are in possession of valid drivers' permits, and have not been drinking, be allowed to drive.

News photographs of cars, which have been involved in fatal accidents, invariably show extensive damage done to these vehicles, which suggest that many of them could not have been operated within the speed limit. The absence of Police traffic patrols is seen by irresponsible drivers as an invitation to speed, to overtake two and more vehicles at one time without due care and attention to oncoming traffic, until it is too late, all too often not merely for themselves, but for their passengers and other users of the road. Let us hope that this long Easter weekend the nation's drivers will be more responsible and that the police patrols will deal with those who are not.