THERE are way too many fatal and serious accidents happening on our roadways. This is not a localised issue; it is ubiquitous all across the country. Something is wrong. It is time we pinpoint the contributing factors and nip it in the bud right away. Is there an issue with traffic administration, driver competence, road use culture or enforcement? In the opinion of this columnist, it is all of the above, and then some.
Let me say from the outset, I do not believe it is all doom and gloom. On the administration side, we see great efforts by the government to install electronic speed monitors, speed trap cameras and other forms of data capture, processing and automation technology. To accompany this effort, the Attorney General has announced that relevant laws are being refined to ensure congruence with the deployed technology. One would be hard pressed to criticise these laudable efforts. It shows that the government is aware and are pursuing initiatives to make our roads safer.
That said, I would advocate for these efforts to go even further and fast. I wish to use this space to again advocate for the establishment of a Department of Traffic and Road Safety, to bring under one roof all aspects of traffic administration. As it stands, the Guyana Revenue Authority, the Guyana Police Force, the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Works share responsibility for fragmented aspects of traffic administration. Of those tasked with various aspects of traffic administration, the Guyana Police Force is the most burdened. For example, Certifying Officers who are responsible for inspecting and certifying the fitness of vehicles literally require an entire complement of staff to conduct inspections, write up and issue fitness certificates, do financial processing and bookkeeping; all through a labour-intensive process. The police are required to actually inspect every aspect of the operation of a vehicle before issuing a certificate, but they are so burdened that they don’t even bother to carry out an inspection. They simply take your registration or an old fitness certificate, collect the required fee and write a certificate of fitness. We actually do not know how many defective vehicles are being certified daily. Not to mention, the already labourious process used for issuing and tracking traffic tickets, inevitably resulting in less than optimum management of the process. Imagine complicating that with the new system of electronic traffic management. The police will be responsible for generating tickets, downloading video footage, corroborating evidence for prosecution and ensuring the administration of the process to its logical conclusion.
Further, imagine if we add to that a demerit points system. The police will have to scale back their crime fighting efforts to administer such a system. This is not the best use of officers who are trained for law enforcement. Perhaps this was a sufficient arrangement when there were just a few vehicles on our roadways and just about one thousand new vehicles per year. However, with the exponential growth of all categories of vehicles on our roadways, it is diverting away valuable resources and manpower from actual policing.
Let the police stick to law enforcement and turn over these administrative functions to a civilian organisation. The only administrative responsibilities the police should be asked to carry out is administration of the force itself. Even if the entire certifying and ticketing processes were to be automated it will still require tremendous resources for back-office administration; functions best carried out by a civilian organisation.
In the area of driver competence, we have a pretty robust system on the books, but every Guyanese know that shortcuts are taken in the system, as long as the written test is successfully taken and a valid provisional driver’s license is presented, the burdened force is known to skip the procedures for practical testing and issue competence certificates following verbal interviews. A paradigm shift is necessary.
We probably need an entire column to discuss our poor driving and road use culture. Suffice it to say, we need massive public reeducation and reorientation on the use of our roadways. If we continue to ask the police to undertake so many traffic administration responsibilities, then it doesn’t take much imagination to understand why enforcement cannot be more effective than it is. It is routine for motorcyclists to just ride past the police without a helmet and vehicles with a tinted front windscreen can exist with impunity, knowing that the chances of being detained are next to zero.
How does one write a column on traffic management in Guyana without mentioning the marauding madness of the “sand trucks” on our roads, especially on the East Bank of Demerara? Things are bad. We are losing our citizens senselessly; this is a major national emergency.