There are too many fatal road accidents

Dec 29, 2013 APNU Column, Features / Columnists

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The tragic death of Guyana’s Chief Librarian in a road accident on Christmas Eve day should have shocked the Guyana Police Force and the Ministry of Home Affairs. Then, again, the authorities were unmoved by the road deaths of former Commissioner of Police Henry Greene last year and of Assistant Commissioner Derrick Josiah, this month.
Road accidents are a grave human safety problem. The Ministry of Health’s National Rehabilitation Services Strategy 2009-2013 revealed that road accidents were among the top 10 leading causes of death and account for the greatest number of disabilities.  One thousand, five hundred and sixty-three persons have been killed in traffic accidents in 2002-2012 and over 100 have already been killed for the current year, 2013 – a rough average of about a dozen deaths every month.
Thousands more have suffered injuries or lost limbs as a result of traffic accidents. It is estimated that the cost of medical care of accident victims exceeds more than G$100M per year at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation alone. The loss of productivity, loss of earnings of the victims and premature funeral expenses resulting from accidents cost Guyana many more millions annually.
The launch of the UN’s Global Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020 seems to have made little impact on the administration’s efforts to end this epidemic. The ‘decade of action’ was intended to provide countries with guidelines to save lives and prevent injuries through safer roads, road users and vehicles; road safety management and a post-crash response.
The Guyana National Road Safety Council followed the UN’s lead by launching its National Road Safety Strategy for 2013-2020 this year. The ‘road safety strategy’ is intended to reduce deaths from accidents by approximately half of the 115 road fatalities in 2010 to 58 in 2020. The practical results of both strategies, however, are still to be seen.
The reasons for the high rate of road deaths are not difficult to discern. The main coastal roadways are not highways at all, but merely continuous village streets.  Most roads run through heavily populated villages and are often unlit at night. Most have no sidewalks and the verges are encumbered by vendors’ stalls thus forcing bicyclists and pedestrians onto the motorways. There, plucky pedestrians must compete with cars, horse-drawn carts, motorcycles, stray dogs, farm animals and parked or broken-down vehicles.
It is still common to see paddy being dried, animals straying and unescorted children on these roadways. In addition, the surfaces of the main roadways – the East Berbice, West Berbice, East Demerara, West Demerara and Linden-Soesdyke – have deteriorated making driving hazardous.
The biggest contributory factor to fatalities, perhaps, has been drivers’ dangerous habits. There are now about 80,000 vehicles on Guyana’s roads. Some drivers of commercial vehicles and minibuses, however, simply do not have the skill, experience or temperament to be entrusted with responsibility for human lives on public roads. Many drive defective or overloaded vehicles recklessly or at unsafe speeds and display aggressive behaviour and poor road discipline. Too many persons drive under the influence of alcohol, ignore the seat belt rules, or use mobile phones while driving.
The Guyana Police Force, from time to time, has launched enforcement operations such as ‘Operation Safeway’ and ‘Operation Road Order.’ These, however, quickly degenerated into the frenzied arrests of hundreds of petty offenders without stopping the spiralling toll of fatalities. Such operations failed simply because they did not address the fundamental causes of fatalities. Police preoccupation with picayune infractions obscures their perception and totally absorbs their energies. They ignore the most deadly problems.
Responses to excessive speeding on the roadways should also include patrolling high-risk zones by day and night; enforcing lower speed limits wherever public roads run through populous rural communities; ensuring that minibuses and other commercial vehicles carry the lawful complement of cargo or passengers; banning distracting music and movies from minibuses and prohibiting the sale of intoxicating beverages in or near to public transportation terminals.
Many fatalities on the roads occur at night or on weekends and on open stretches of country road. High-risk rural areas, however, attract low-level attention from the traffic police. Traffic policemen work less at night and do not have enough motorcycles to reach to the out-of-town trouble spots.
Many unqualified and incompetent drivers are not fit to drive taxis and buses. There is, however, no programme for identifying and taking them out of the driving seats. No countrywide computer database has been established to authenticate their drivers’ licences – a measure that requires cooperation between the Guyana Police Force and the Guyana Revenue Authority.
Guyana’s ranking among Anglophone Caribbean countries – The Bahamas (13.7); Barbados (7.3); Belize (16.4); Jamaica (11.6) and Trinidad and Tobago (16.7) – for fatality rates per 100,000 owing to traffic accidents, therefore, is no surprise.
Guyana, at 27.8 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, is the worst by a wide margin.

 

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