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
