If the mortality rate in T&T does not lessen, the country's 1.3 million population could see a significant decrease in the next decade. This was the view of senior researcher of the University of the West Indies (UWI) Godfrey St Bernard. He was speaking yesterday at a seminar, titled Road Traffic Crashes in T&T, at the Hilton Trinidad and Conference Centre. In his presentation, he told the audience the rate of deaths in T&T had been rising over the past few years. He said if that continued the rate could exceed 10,000 annually. He said contributing to that were the 200-300 road accidents annually.
He said the proliferation of foreign-used vehicles had contributed to the traffic congestion in the country.
He said eight out of ten fatalities were male. St Bernard said T&T was a small country, and numbers as high as 200 a year were worrying. He called for micro-level data on road fatalities, injuries and non-fatal accidents because the information provided by the Central Statistical Office was not enough. "Without data, serious research cannot be done," St Bernard added. Lisa-Gaye Greene, project manager at GeoInformatics Institute at UWI's Mona Campus, gave examples of micro-level data used to map road accidents in Jamaica.
She said road safety campaigns traditionally focused on drivers and pedestrians but should be focused on vehicles and roads as well. She said UWI (Jamaica) was now taking a new look at combating road accidents by focusing on well designed and well constructed roads, training and retraining of drivers and advanced safety features in vehicles. The seminar was organised by the Occupational Environmental Safety and Health Programme of UWI's Department of Chemistry.