Gail Alexan­der

Mod­ern speed guns which po­lice will use on the roads from Feb­ru­ary will be able to pin­point speed­ing cars more than a mile away, Trans­port Min­is­ter Stephen Cadiz said yes­ter­day."Af­ter many years this is fi­nal­ly com­ing to pass," Cadiz added at yes­ter­day's week­ly post-Cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing.

He said in­vi­ta­tions to ten­der to sup­ply the de­vices will be is­sued soon and the Ve­hi­cle Man­age­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T (VM­COTT) is the pro­cure­ment agency for the Po­lice Ser­vice. He said the de­vices will be the most mod­ern hand-held types and he ex­pect­ed the pro­ject­ed 400 speed guns will be in use by Feb­ru­ary 2014, de­pend­ing on de­liv­ery.

The At­tor­ney Gen­er­al's di­vi­sion will draft nec­es­sary changes for the law and al­so to the Metrol­o­gy Act, which per­tains to mea­sure­ments.Cadiz said the speed guns will be used by the High­way Pa­trol and in var­i­ous oth­er ways along the high­ways. Po­lice will have to be trained in their use.Say­ing the speed guns will be a huge as­sis­tance in curb­ing traf­fic ac­ci­dents, Cadiz lament­ed the car­nage on the roads, which he at­trib­uted square­ly to speed­ing.

"It's say­ing some­thing is be­ing done very wrong if your car ends up stuck ver­ti­cal­ly be­tween the bars of the bridge on a river­side. Six peo­ple died last week­end al­so," he added.In view of the vast­ness of lo­cal high­ways now, the is­sue of the speed lim­it had to be ex­am­ined at some point, he said, in­clud­ing the 30-50 mph lev­el, and ques­tions had to be an­swered on whether the speed lim­it could be en­forced via the speed guns.

Cadiz al­so said a com­plete "180-de­gree" re­form will be in­volved in the new Li­cens­ing Au­thor­i­ty, for which he says he's giv­en him­self a per­son­al dead­line of Sep­tem­ber 2014.He said the au­thor­i­ty will have cat­e­gories for ju­ve­nile dri­vers, ma­ture dri­vers, ve­hi­cle DNA, ways of do­ing busi­ness more eas­i­ly, pay­ing park­ing tick­ets by phone and oth­er fa­cil­i­ties.