Jamaicans should have no patience with the crocodile tears being shed by public authorities about the more than 400 citizens killed on our roads during 2019. In less easy-going societies, those accountable would be fired, or worse, charged for complicity. No mincing of words is acceptable in the face of the mangled bodies lying in a line of coffins, which could almost stretch between any two towns in the land.
Because nothing, virtually nothing, effective has been done during 2019 to avert the increasing carnage. The Road Safety Council, the Ministry of Transport, the motor insurance companies, and sundry others, have been issuing mealy-mouthed platitudes about careful driving, fixing potholes, amending laws and fitting electronic attachments to vehicles, all adding up to nothing achieved and increasingly disastrous statistics.
They are complicit and must be pressured to do more going into a new decade. Start with the obvious. For whatever it will be worth, it is sheer negligence that the regulations to the new (almost old by now) Road Traffic Act have not been given priority on the government’s legislative agenda. No one, not even the Minister, knows when this task will be completed.
Jamaicans must demand the passage and enforcement of adequate laws to stop the flow of blood on our roads. This is a single measure over which our government has complete control and cannot be treated callously. What excuse can there be?
Minister Montague has spoken lamely about the many other laws which have to be made congruent with the Road Traffic Act. So, why has he not had them changed by now? If it had been one of the legal reforms required by the International Monetary Fund, you bet it would have been prioritised.
Important though the law is, the situation on the nation’s roads cannot be curbed only by statutes because it is redolent of a deep and increasing infection of accepted disorder in the nation which no administration has the insight or the guts to confront. The free-for-all mentality is both cause and outcome of a feeling that the height of personal achievement is to do whatever pleases us and advances individual interests. What is the common good anyway?
According to this mindset, laws are impediments to progress rather than aids to order. So if a driver needs to show off, satisfy a convenience or get somewhere quickly, why follow the rules? Why not ride the sidewalk, stop where you please, run the light or streak ahead like the ministers with their sirens and outriders? After all, man free! Don’t you see how road licenses are being let off, how the man with hundreds of tickets gets a slap on the wrist, and how easy it is to drop the policeman a money?
And the schoolers especially, as well as the general public, see what it takes to get ahead and learns very well the lessons for their own lives.
Somebody, please do a simple tally of the number of vehicles on the road, compared to the number covered by the insurance companies. And check how many actual inspections are done by the Island Traffic Authority, versus the number of certificates of fitness issued annually.
Only a carefully planned and incorruptly enforced, multi-year programme of public sensitisation, driver education and retraining can begin to change these attitudes. And even that is doubtful if the nation continues to import thousands of additional vehicles every year.
For decades, and continuing, people have been able to buy drivers licences or, in the case of motorcyclists, been able to operate indefinitely on the basis of a learner’s permit.
Beginning now, in earnest of, or with the authority of new law, the only way to overcome the corruption and negligence of the past and present is to require that, over the next three years, every licence holder must pass a road code test, and be recertified both for technical competence as well as emotional stability and psychological balance. All this at the applicant’s expense, and to be repeated every 10 years.
Clearly the current apparatus of government has proved itself unable and unworthy to carry out such a process. A new small industry, with operatives trained by the HEART Trust/NTA and UTech, may be developed in each parish, under the supervision of a state agency, to certify vehicle roadworthiness and to undertake driver education and certification.
In 2020, cut the sermonising and the hand-wringing about the injuries and fatalities, and implement radical and dramatic correctives commensurate to the tragedy of 400 dead and countless thousand broken bodies in the past year.
If they are to avoid the verdict of complicity or incompetence, both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition must show where they would lead us in the matter of road safety now.
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