Dear Editor,
Guyanese women once more celebrated an inauspicious day – a day of mourning the loss of loved ones – destroyed by reckless and, in most cases, unapprehended drivers. They plead helplessly for redress every year, hopelessly without consolation, each time.
The fact is that their pain is largely the result of persistent indifference, and consequently the inertia, if not the carelessness, of the Traffic Department of the Guyana Police Force.
Too many citizens have not only complained, but have also made recommendations for abating the carnage on our roads, all to no avail. The so-called Road Safety Council is an inept, unimaginative and useless institution. There has not been a single new mechanism introduced to curb bad manners and worse driving in this country. The breathalyser can hardly be described as an effective deterrent, if only because it is used selectively.
The practical measures of containment and control which can benefit motorists, cyclists and pedestrians (including those whose carelessness contributes to their own destruction and dismemberment), and are routinely operational in neighbouring Caribbean countries, for example, are stubbornly not instituted on our highways (and byways!).
i) For instance, anyone would have thought that the installation of (too few) traffic lights, however operationally volatile, would logically be supplemented by all other ‘Stop’ signs being placed upright. Certainly these will be welcome ‘signs’ to the tourist population we boast about, not to mention the untrained drivers who only mimic their bad older counterparts. The faint and washed-out signs on dusty and flooded roads are also totally undetectable in the poorly lit nights.
In any case those who deign to stop or pause cannot see the ‘sign’ until he/she gets very close to, or actually on it, a near impossibility at the fast rate usually travelled. This upright posture will certainly reduce the amount of bending over by the police to repaint, too infrequently as it is.
ii) In any case there are few, if any, speed limit signs in the city of Georgetown.
iii) Look around and count the number of ‘No Entry‘ signs in Georgetown, starting with Sheriff Street. Next look for signs saying:
a) No Left/Right Turn; b) Slow; c) Caution; s) Give Way (To The Right) – signs which visitors (including tourists) expect to see in normally managed transport systems.
iv) It goes totally unnoticed, the rapidly increasing numbers of new drivers on the roads, certainly by the police, who should wonder how come they have never certified them as trained. These drivers constitute an impressively dangerous body of ignorance of a single traffic law.
Those who use taxis would testify to the illiteracy of too many of their drivers. The latter not only cannot read a street name, but rely on the passenger to find a particular neighbourhood in the city.
But they are not nearly as dangerous as drivers of trucks, containers, and other oversized vehicles on our over-crowded roads.
Minimal effort is made by the police to insist that all transport drivers, private and public, be trained and certified by the Traffic Department, before the relevant licences are issued by the Guyana Revenue Authority, from whose department drivers boast they are easily available on an incentive basis.
Surely there must be members of the National Road Safety Council who are aware of the above delinquencies. What prevents them from discharging their responsibility, first to the mothers who mourn their children? It needs no rocket science. We (including the media) must intensify the campaign for at least the normal controls to be implemented – to save children, adults (including the police).
Yours faithfully,
E B John
