Cindy Raghubar

More than 2,000 peo­ple have died on the na­tion's road­ways in the past ten years.

An ex­am­i­na­tion of the sta­tis­tics record­ed over the past decade show that be­tween 2005 and 2015, fa­tal road traf­fic ac­ci­dents ac­count­ed for 2,170 deaths, of which 2,040 were adults and 130 were chil­dren.

For the year to date, 143 peo­ple have been killed. The fig­ure in­cludes dri­vers, pas­sen­gers, pedes­tri­ans, mo­tor­cy­clists and cy­clists.

To be even more spe­cif­ic, 112 men, 21 women and ten chil­dren lost their lives as a re­sult of road car­nage in 2015.

This re­flect­ed an eight per cent de­crease sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, when com­pared to 2014 and as it stands right now (da­ta as at De­cem­ber 16), that fig­ure is the low­est it has been for at least the past ten years.

This de­cline ac­cord­ing to As­sis­tant Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice, Mo­bile, De­o­dat Du­lalchan, is a re­sult of strate­gic ef­forts ex­e­cut­ed by the Traf­fic and High­way Pa­trol Branch of the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice.

"Most of our ac­ci­dents used to take place on our high­ways, but two years ago we would have done some re­search try­ing to iden­ti­fy hot days and hot lo­ca­tions. As a con­se­quence of that, we would have iden­ti­fied about nine ar­eas on the high­ways...What we would have done was tar­get those ar­eas, times, lo­ca­tions and so on," said Du­lalchan.

Hot days and hot lo­ca­tions re­fer to days of the week and spe­cif­ic places re­spec­tive­ly, at which road ac­ci­dents oc­cur.

Du­lalchan told the GML En­ter­prise Desk that "of all of the ac­ci­dents we would have had this year, 67 per cent did not take place on the high­ways. That is tremen­dous."

Con­tribut­ing to this, he said, may be the fact that more and more mo­torists are us­ing sec­ondary routes fre­quent­ly. A lot of these al­ter­nate routes Du­lalchan said, were not built for in­tense traf­fic like that ex­pe­ri­enced along the M2 Ring Road, in Debe, where six peo­ple died this year.

Du­lalchan said he was con­cerned with the speed at which dri­vers ac­cel­er­ate on both pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary routes, which have a speed lim­it of 50 km/ph.

"Speed to my mind is very crit­i­cal, the im­pact that an ac­ci­dent can have with speed is tremen­dous. Do we not un­der­stand how frag­ile we are on our road­way and whether we are pay­ing the kind of in­ter­est we should be pay­ing as it re­lates to our own per­son­al safe­ty," he said.

He said that the poor en­gi­neer­ing of a road now heav­i­ly tra­versed could par­tial­ly ac­count for the col­li­sions there.

En­gi­neer with the Traf­fic Man­age­ment Branch of the Min­istry of Works and In­fra­struc­ture Nali­ni Sama­roo, said they would be do­ing some milling round the cor­ners of the M2 Ring Road in par­tic­u­lar to help with the fric­tion prob­lem ex­pe­ri­enced.

Speak­ing to the me­dia at a press con­fer­ence along the M2 Ring Road on Tues­day she con­firmed that the Min­istry was al­so con­sid­er­ing the in­stal­la­tion of rum­ble strips along the M2 Ring Road, but did not re­veal more on that safe­ty de­vice.

Rum­ble strips have al­ready been in­stalled along parts of the La­dy Young Road, Mor­vant and the Mos­qui­to Creek, La Ro­maine. They are meant to jolt dri­vers who may be falling asleep on them­selves, but pri­mar­i­ly they are meant to alert dri­vers of the need to slow down.

De­spite the com­mon per­cep­tion that dri­vers usu­al­ly sur­vive fa­tal col­li­sions while pas­sen­gers die, the sta­tis­tics paint a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent re­al­i­ty.

Over the past ten years more than 800 dri­vers were killed be­hind the wheel while just over 600 pas­sen­gers lost their lives.

Du­lalchan called on pas­sen­gers in pri­vate ve­hi­cle and taxis to speak up if they do not feel safe with the way some­one is dri­ving.

He said em­ploy­ers al­so have a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to en­sure em­ploy­ees are fit to dri­ve.

"What role are we play­ing as an em­ploy­er if you have work­ers who are work­ing shift and prob­a­bly dou­bling up the shift, whether you might be will­ing to en­cour­age them that they prob­a­bly need to take a lit­tle rest be­fore they try to hur­ried­ly reach home."

Du­lalchan said more and more bread­win­ners, in some cas­es a sole provider, are killed. Not on­ly does this af­fect the emo­tion­al, so­cial and fi­nan­cial cir­cum­stances of a fam­i­ly but the var­i­ous sys­tems of the coun­try as well, in­clud­ing the health sec­tor, with peo­ple ward­ed and left nurs­ing in­juries for months fol­low­ing an ac­ci­dent.

The head of the Traf­fic Branch said every­one should get on board to spread the mes­sage of road safe­ty, re­peat­ing that one life lost is one too many.

He said if ba­sic rules are fol­lowed then many ac­ci­dents could be pre­vent­ed, he called these the ABC rules: Don't dri­ve on the shoul­der of the high­ways, don't use hand­held de­vices while dri­ving and make sure you fas­ten your seat­belts.

He said mo­torists are reg­u­lar­ly in breach of those of­fences when caught by High­way Pa­trol of­fi­cers. In ad­di­tion, dri­ving un­der the in­flu­ence of al­co­hol or oth­er im­pair­ing drugs con­tribute to ac­ci­dents, he said.

"Try to trim off all dis­trac­tions when you are dri­ving. We want you to dri­ve to­day so that you will be able to dri­ve to­mor­row. Bet­ter you reach your lo­ca­tion late than you try to beat the clock and you ain't reach at all."

To­mor­row we look at those left be­hind fol­low­ing the deaths of loved ones on the na­tion's roads.

More in­fo:

More dri­vers than pas­sen­gers killed be­tween n 2005-2015

n 2,040- adults

n 130 � mi­nors

n 812- dri­vers

n 608- pas­sen­gers

n 610- pedes­tri­ans

n 89- mo­tor­cy­clists

n 51- cy­clists

Dis­turb­ing pat­tern:

The pat­tern shows five ar­eas which ac­count for more than a third of the to­tal fa­tal­i­ties this year: 11 peo­ple were killed at var­i­ous spots along the Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route (which runs from Ari­ma to Port-of-Spain), 12 peo­ple died along the Churchill Roo­sevelt High­way (which runs from Cu­mu­to to Port-of-Spain), 15 peo­ple lost their lives along the Solomon Ho­choy High­way (which runs from Ch­agua­nas to San Fer­nan­do), 7 along the Uri­ah But­ler High­way (which runs from Grand Bazaar to Ch­agua­nas) and 6 peo­ple were killed along the M2 Ring Road (which con­nects Gol­con­da to Debe).