Rishard Khan

Re­porter

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

More than 41,000 tick­ets have been is­sued for the year to date ac­cord­ing to TTPS Road Safe­ty project co­or­di­na­tor Sgt Brent Bat­son. He is ap­peal­ing to peo­ple to be safer on the na­tion’s roads.

Bat­son said U-turn sys­tem da­ta shows that 41,328 fixed penal­ty no­tices have been giv­en out to mo­torists for var­i­ous vi­o­la­tions. The most com­mon in­frac­tions are fail­ure to wear seat­belts, traf­fic sign vi­o­la­tions, speed­ing, us­ing mo­bile phones while dri­ving and dri­ving with­out in­sur­ance.

He said the to­tal num­ber of tick­ets is­sued so far this year is in line with an­nu­al trends but the vi­o­la­tions are quite se­ri­ous.

“What is dis­turb­ing from the da­ta com­ing in from the tick­et is that three of those top five of­fences that are tick­et­ed across the coun­try are con­sid­ered high-risk be­hav­iours on the road,” Bat­son said.

“It tells us just from the tick­et­ing da­ta that we have a lot of work still to do just from an ed­u­ca­tion­al side as well as en­forc­ing side to try and de­ter per­sons from en­gag­ing in this type of be­hav­iour on the roads.”

He said while of­fi­cers is­sue tick­ets as a de­ter­rent, mem­bers of the pub­lic of­ten ac­cuse them of hav­ing ul­te­ri­or mo­tives.

“One of the things per­sons would some­times fo­cus on is that you know we’re out there do­ing road traf­fic en­force­ment is that the . . . po­lice and law en­force­ment of­fi­cers just out there try­ing to get rev­enue for the Gov­ern­ment when re­al­ly what we’re try­ing to do is de­tect and de­ter un­safe dri­ving be­hav­iours which, again, will re­sult in pre­ventable loss of life and limbs,” he said.

Bat­son said da­ta showed a 17 per cent re­duc­tion in road fa­tal­i­ties. How­ev­er, fa­tal­i­tie do oc­cur, it’s be­cause of speed­ing, dri­ving un­der the in­flu­ence and fail­ure to wear seat­belts. He said that is why po­lice of­fi­cers fo­cus their en­force­ment ef­forts on seat­belts and speed­ing vi­o­la­tions.

While TTPS da­ta shows 17 per cent re­duc­tion in fa­tal­i­ties, Ar­rive Alive’s web­site puts it at 18 per cent. Their sta­tis­tics show that there have been 28 fa­tal­i­ties for the year to date, 14 on high­ways and 14 on main roads. The 14 high­way fa­tal­i­ties were from 14 ac­ci­dents, wh­lie the 14 main road fa­tal­i­ties were from 13 ac­ci­dents.

Glob­al Road Safe­ty Week is be­ing ob­served from May 15 to 19. This year’s theme fo­cus­es on sus­tain­able trans­port and the need for gov­ern­ments to fa­cil­i­tate a shift to walk­ing, cy­cling and us­ing pub­lic trans­port.

Ar­rive Alive will be em­bark­ing on an aware­ness cam­paign with videos fea­tur­ing in­flu­encers to draw at­ten­tion to the need for vul­ner­a­ble road users and mo­torists to be safe on the na­tion’s roads. In June, they will part­ner with the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port to host the an­nu­al Road Safe­ty Awards which ho­n­our first re­spon­ders for their com­mit­ment to sav­ing lives on the na­tion’s roads.