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BLIND MAN’S BUFF

Dec 20, 2019 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

It is said that you cannot expect different results if you continue doing the same thing all the time. This is a strategy for failure
Everyone has a solution to the deaths and accidents which are taking place on the country’s roads. Some of the suggestions include having a more visible presence of the police on the road, banning minibuses and reintroducing larger buses.
The assumption is that there is a serious problem with road deaths and drastic actions needs to be taken. No one has questioned whether indeed there is a problem with road accidents and road deaths.
Earlier this month, the President, in urging road users to adhere to the 5 Cs of road safety, observed that 114 road deaths had occurred in 97 road accidents this year. This is less than two deaths per fatal accident which does not suggest a general pattern of insane use of the roads by motorists.
There, however, have horrific accidents resulting in multiples deaths, such as the one a few days ago in Mahaicony which took five lives. One motorcyclist also died last week following a collision between two motor cycles.
The first assessment, therefore, which should be made is whether there has been an appreciable increase in road deaths. In 2018, there were 92 road deaths from 79 road accidents. The data suggest a steep spike in road accidents for this year but the numbers have been inflated by the large number of fatalities in November and December.
The comparative data suggest that road accidents for this year are not above the annual average of the past ten years. Two years ago, it was reported that an average of 128 persons were killed each year on the country’s roads.
Despite the large number of road fatalities in November and December 2019, this year’s road deaths have not eclipsed the annual average of the past ten years.
Therefore, it cannot be concluded that there has been a serious increase in road deaths. Not when one considers all the factors including the growth of vehicular traffic over the past few years.
It is not a nice thing to say but road deaths have never been totally eliminated in any country, including those with draconian traffic laws. What therefore has to be managed is the number of fatal accidents.
Unfortunately, the type of data which needs to be collected are not being collected to inform a course of action. Raw and crude data about the number of road fatalities and the number of fatal accidents do not form a proper basis for developing road safety polices. In fact, such raw and crude data can be extremely misleading.
If one goes right back to the old data on road fatalities, there is evidence that pedestrians are just as high-risk as passengers and drivers of motor vehicles. When the authorities therefore make releases about the total number of road accidents, they should ensure that they disaggregate the number of pedestrians killed.
Road safety measures therefore cannot focus only on vehicle but also on pedestrians including children wandering on the road and drunker cyclists straying into the path of moving vehicles on public roads.
Policies and solutions must be data-driven not blame-driven. Guyanese love to ascribe causes and blame without substantiating data.
Road safety has to begin with the collection of data that are comprehensive and in line with the sort of data which is called in other countries, including property damage and insurance compensation. The data quality on road accidents is poor.
The data which are available would leave little doubt however, that police traffic campaigns have done little to improve road safety. And asking the police to step up their monitoring of the traffic laws is bound to be another useless and failed exercise.
That strategy has been tried numerous times before and has failed. Doing the same thing and expecting different results is an exercise in futility.
Neither data nor the expertise exists locally to develop an effective road safety strategy. And the faster the government realizes this, the quicker it will end the blind-man’s buff which is being undertaken by the police under the pretext of traffic campaigns.

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