A num­ber of deaths on the na­tion’s roads could have been eas­i­ly pre­vent­ed, Road Safe­ty Of­fi­cer Brent Bat­son said yes­ter­day as he broke down the road traf­fic ac­ci­dent sta­tis­tics at the week­ly po­lice brief­ing at the Po­lice Ad­min­is­tra­tion build­ing.

“In the year 2019 Trinidad & To­ba­go con­tin­ued to ex­pe­ri­ence a sus­tained re­duc­tion in fa­tal road traf­fic ac­ci­dents record­ing 102 fa­tal road traf­fic ac­ci­dents in 2019 com­pared to 110 in 2018.

The fig­ure rep­re­sent­ed a 7% re­duc­tion in fa­tal road traf­fic ac­ci­dents. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, there was an in­crease in the num­ber of road deaths from 118 in 2018 to 121 in 2019 rep­re­sent­ing a 3% in­crease in lives lost,” said Bat­son, “So in 2019, un­for­tu­nate­ly, we ex­pe­ri­enced more mul­ti­ple fa­tal in­ci­dents, where we had a re­duc­tion in crash­es but an in­crease in the num­ber of lives tak­en as a re­sult of those crash­es.”

Bat­son sin­gled out one sta­tis­tic which wor­ried him in par­tic­u­lar; the num­ber of pedes­tri­ans who died while at­tempt­ing to cross the na­tion’s high­ways.

“A wor­ri­some sta­tis­tic is that most fa­tal high­way ac­ci­dents were cod­ed as be­ing pedes­tri­ans cross­ing car­riage­way heed­less to traf­fic. This demon­strat­ed a 57% in­crease in its preva­lence in 2019. And that just goes to show how pre­ventable a lot of these in­ci­dents were if peo­ple would just to use pedes­tri­an cross­ing ar­eas and would use walkover in­fra­struc­ture,” he said.

He ex­plained that in 2019, high­ways saw a 25% in­crease in fa­tal road traf­fic ac­ci­dents while con­verse­ly main roads and Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route ex­pe­ri­enced de­creas­es of 21% and 43% re­spec­tive­ly. This rep­re­sent­ed the low­est main road and Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route fa­tal road traf­fic ac­ci­dent fig­ures for the past decade.

“So we did see some progress in some ar­eas,” he said.