It is with great in­ter­est that I have been look­ing on at the new gov­ern­ment over the past 60 days and I have to ap­plaud the ef­fort put in so far to try to im­prove the lives of cit­i­zens.

I al­so wel­come the Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port's plan to make it il­le­gal to dri­ve and use a cell­phone. This is the norm in many coun­tries around the world and there have been enough stud­ies done world­wide to sup­port the pass­ing of such a law.

How­ev­er, like many oth­er peo­ple in T&T, I have great doubt in the abil­i­ty or de­sire of the Po­lice Ser­vice to en­force such a law. A per­fect ex­am­ple of why I have doubts is the amount of dri­vers that play ex­ces­sive­ly loud mu­sic. It is my opin­ion that this is as much, if not more, of a dis­trac­tion to the dri­ver than talk­ing on a cell­phone.

It is, at present, against the law to play loud mu­sic in a car and this of­fence car­ries a fine of $1,000. Yet on any giv­en day you can count a few cars well that are play­ing mu­sic at ear-split­ting lev­els. It is all well and good to pass laws to deal with in­dis­ci­pline on our roads but what we re­al­ly need is to have the present laws and any new laws en­forced. The sit­u­a­tion we are in is not due to a lack of laws but rather a lack of law and or­der due to the law not be­ing en­forced over many years.

So I say yes, pass what laws are need­ed but let's have im­me­di­ate ac­tion to start en­forc­ing the ones that are al­ready in place. I think we would all be sur­prised by the im­pact this could have on our lives.

Bruce Dar­went

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