We have been, for many months now, in the grip of a season of elevated madness on our roads, a period characterized by road use behaviour that has been characterized by ever increasing levels of recklessness, to which the traffic authorities appear to have no serious response, so that – or at least so it seems – we must watch the lunacy and its consequences play out to grim endings and attendant grief, stricken, it seems, by a powerlessness to bring these horrific anomalies under at least some reasonable measure of control. Absurd, admittedly, but regrettably true.
The problem has its roots in an ever increasing lack of mindfulness of the traffic laws, on the one hand and what, on the other, is an enforcement effort that is manifestly failing to keep pace with the magnitude of the problem. The Police Traffic Department, whose task it is to enforce road use rules and sanction transgressions is not, and has not been, for years, quite up to the task. This, for reasons, that sometimes appear attributable as much to a lack of strident effort as to capacity shortcoming, the issue of corruption at levels of traffic administration being one that the police high command still appear reluctant to accept without equivocation.
It is the fact that the aforementioned ‘madness’ on our roads is proceeding unabated and more than that, the fact that the outcomes of these displays of madness are exacting an unbearably high price, that compels persistent and pointed public comment on the problem. These days, a combination of continually rising levels of disregard for traffic laws and a decidedly deficient traffic management regime have seen our coastal traffic management system buckle dangerously under the sheer weight of the problem. Attendant to this weakness are some current trends in contemporary road use behaviour that point to a widespread and complete absence of mindfulness of our traffic laws.
Nor does the price that we pay seem to serve as any kind of restraint-influencing factor. Beginning with the October 15 2019 collision on the East Bank Highway involving a police vehicle and resulting in five deaths we have had to endure a spurt of multiple-fatality accidents which, for a far too fleeting period left behind a kind of national numbness. Short memories have meant that we have left that shock and grief behind, current road use patterns suggesting that we have quietly returned to a ‘normalcy’ of risking life and limb, embracing calamity as an occupational hazard of our road use culture. As the situation worsens the enforcement authorities appear increasingly out of their depth insofar as imposing workable restraints is concerned. Police reform that includes the stepping up of our traffic management infrastructure simply cannot come quickly enough.
In terms of sheer mind-boggling recklessness, helmetless motorcyclists now appear to have mounted a strong supersession challenge to minibus drivers. They have emerged like an army of adolescent children stricken with some incurable attention deficit malady. Determined to impose their demented street theatre on overwhelmingly unappreciative audiences, they are entirely oblivious to the fact that what they do constitutes a menace to a public that, somehow, they delude themselves into believing, welcomes their antics. The absurdity as much as the danger in their illusion is deeply troubling.
Nor are their antics confined to defying routine restraints that include traffic lights and major roads. Highly dangerous public stunts by helmetless motor-cycled daredevils are frequently performed on the section of Robb Street sandwiched between Wellington and Camp streets helmetless on normal working days. To witness these stunts is to gain a daunting appreciation of the level of risk.
Where helmetless motor cyclists are concerned lawless daredevils are not the only transgressors. One is just as certain these days to see presumably otherwise law-abiding but helmet-less citizens – parents with young children in tow or casually joy-riding couples, using the roads cheek by jowl with those who are mindful of the helmet law, not infrequently within touching distance of motor-cycled traffic ranks.
There are other anomalies in our coastal traffic management regime that amount to disasters waiting to happen and to which, it appears, no discernable attention is being paid. For all the impressive expanse of road that now carpets a section of the East Coast highway, the absence, up until now, of supporting infrastructure, not least road markings and strategically placed traffic lights, is an absurd omission when account is taken of the significantly stepped up levels of both speed and recklessness being employed (particularly by minibus drivers) on what is now a significantly widened and better-surfaced highway. Indifference to these deficiencies amounts to the nurturing of disasters waiting to happen.
And if it is true that in matters of traffic management the burden of being mindful of the law rests largely with self-regulation, the preponderance of helmetless riders and pillion riders would appear to suggest that, its insistence that it is ‘going after’ these helmetless daredevils notwithstanding, the Police Traffic Department is making nowhere near the impact that it should. If no one is advocating dangerous, daredevil chases through the streets involving motorcycled transgressors and traffic cops it is for the Police Traffic Department to fashion strategies (some of these may involve heavy sanctions for apprehended transgressors) that might at least provide a measure of deterrent to the law-breakers.
The fact that transgression of the helmet law has now become, arguably, as much the exception as the rule, points to an unacceptable weakness in the deterrent capabilities of the Police Traffic Department. There is no denying that reality. Frankly, it is as much the distressing regularity with which, these days, some of the youthful motorcycle stuntmen get sent to an early grave as the general menace that they pose to a more orderly traffic regime that compel and appeal to the Police Traffic Department to ‘put the boot in,’ (figuratively speaking) before we pay an even higher price. Frankly, a point has long been reached where current road use trends reflect an open and cynical defiance of both the laws and the law enforcement authorities.
