Carisa Lee

There have been 38 road traf­fic ac­ci­dents at the in­ter­sec­tion of the Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route (PBR) and Ma­coya since 2017.

In 2018 one per­son lost their life. And three ac­ci­dents have so far been record­ed this year.

Shelly-Ann Williams, a pro­pri­etor in the area, said she was not at her busi­ness place when a car crashed in­to it two years ago. She is still trau­ma­tised.

“It’s scary, it’s scary…They broke the light, hit an­oth­er ve­hi­cle lose con­trol, and ran straight in­to here,” she said..

The own­er of Re­vive Beau­ty Bar said in the last six years at the lo­ca­tion she has no­ticed that a lot of the ac­ci­dents took place over the week­end. She said many hap­pened be­cause dri­vers speed and run the red lights.

“Two went down in­to the drain there, it’s like the ex­act same thing…wee hours of the morn­ing, Sun­day evening like every­body come from the beach, the riv­er and they rush­ing home, etc. you tend to see a lot of that,” she said.

On Sun­day, video footage showed an ac­ci­dent in which a sil­ver car (dri­ving along the PBR) crashed in­to a white car (cross­ing the in­ter­sec­tion on Ma­coya Road) and pushed it in­to a near­by drain.

Em­ploy­ee of One Three, One Stop Shop at the in­ter­sec­tion Nark­isha Withe said she has seen a fluc­tu­a­tion of ac­ci­dents in her sev­en years work­ing in the area.

“It does just hap­pen, some­times it does hap­pen plen­ty, some­times it does lessen down,” she said.

She be­lieves she knows why.

“Your great grand­par­ents and stuff while you grow­ing up they would tell you light cross­roads like it have a kind of blight, so it does be light how they al­ways hav­ing ac­ci­dents, I does be light you know here is a cross­road…some­times if it have quar­ters in the road your moth­er go tell you don’t pick it up, they say they like to throw that at cross­roads,” she said.

But Withe said there were al­so log­i­cal rea­sons why the ac­ci­dents at the in­ter­sec­tion hap­pened.

For­mer se­nior traf­fic and trans­porta­tion en­gi­neer­ing lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies Dr Trevor Townsend knows some. He said while he worked with some stu­dents on the field in 2019 one main is­sue was the pris­on­er es­corts.

“Even with sirens on there is no guar­an­tee that a ve­hi­cle which is ap­proach­ing that in­ter­sec­tion from the north would know that there is a prison es­cort on the PBR,” he said.

Video footage from Feb­ru­ary last year showed a car crashed in­to a po­lice ve­hi­cle and in April an am­bu­lance crashed in­to a maxi.

“We had con­cerns about two things ex­ces­sive speed and go­ing through the in­ter­sec­tion some­times in breach of the red sig­nal,” he said.

Townsend said he wrote the for­mer po­lice com­mis­sion­er Gary Grif­fith to have out­rid­ers for pris­on­er es­corts to bring traf­fic to a com­plete stop.

He said he al­so raised the is­sue that the in­ter­sec­tion is im­por­tant to pedes­tri­ans. They count­ed 450 peo­ple most­ly chil­dren while there. Townsend said many unau­tho­rised dri­vers use the Bus Route and he rec­om­mend­ed more en­force­ment of the law.

Townsend said the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty is on the dri­vers.

Ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port, over the past five years, the min­istry has head­ed a new age in the realm of Traf­fic Man­age­ment and Road Safe­ty as T&T has adopt­ed the Safe Sys­tem Ap­proach to road safe­ty.

It said that through the use of the U Turn Sys­tem, the Traf­fic En­force­ment Cen­tre is fa­cil­i­tat­ing 24-hour mon­i­tor­ing of the na­tion’s road net­work.

Tar­get­ing speed is at the top of the agen­da.

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Ac­ci­dents at the in­ter­sec­tion

2017 - Eight ac­ci­dents

2018 - Sev­en ac­ci­dents, one fa­tal­i­ty

2019 - Eight ac­ci­dents

2020 - Four ac­ci­dents

2021 - Eight ac­ci­dents

2022 - Three ac­ci­dents to date

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