The Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) is cau­tion­ing road users, in par­tic­u­lar, pedes­tri­ans to ex­er­cise cau­tion when walk­ing in the vicin­i­ty of road­ways and when cross­ing the road at busy ar­eas.

It said this has be­come nec­es­sary due to the in­creas­ing sta­tis­tics in re­la­tion to road traf­fic deaths.

On Tues­day 31st Au­gust, at around 7:55 pm Cindy Blanc, 43, of Ceme­tery Street, Heights of Gua­napo was killed af­ter be­ing fa­tal­ly struck by a 5 Tonne Flatbed Wreck­er along the East­ern Main Road Waller­field in the North­ern Di­vi­sion.

Ac­cord­ing to fig­ures from the Traf­fic & High­way Pa­trol Branch Road­way Sur­veil­lance Unit (RSU), this in­ci­dent car­ries this year’s road death fig­ure to 53 com­pared to 65 for the same pe­ri­od in 2020.

The state­ment said that al­though this rep­re­sents an 18 per cent de­crease in the na­tion­al road fa­tal­i­ty fig­ure, Blanc’s death car­ries the to­tal amount of pedes­tri­ans killed on the roads to 21 for the year.

Road safe­ty da­ta in­di­cates a dis­turb­ing 31 per cent in­crease in pedes­tri­an fa­tal­i­ties over the same pe­ri­od last year.

Cur­rent­ly, pedes­tri­ans are the largest cat­e­go­ry of road user deaths ac­count­ing for 40 per cent of road traf­fic fa­tal­i­ties for the year. Twen­ty-nine per cent of pedes­tri­an deaths oc­curred while per­sons were at­tempt­ing to cross the high­ways where­as 71 per cent oc­curred along main roads.

Fur­ther analy­sis of the da­ta re­vealed that 76 per cent of pedes­tri­an deaths for this year oc­curred at night and in­ter­est­ing­ly of that, 44 per cent oc­curred dur­ing pre-cur­few hours of 7 pm to 9 pm.

TTPS Road Safe­ty Project Co­or­di­na­tor Sergeant Brent Bat­son said the da­ta sug­gest­ed a cor­re­la­tion be­tween pre-cur­few dri­ver be­hav­iour as­so­ci­at­ed with speed­ing and pedes­tri­an deaths as 71 per cent of the pedes­tri­an deaths dur­ing the pre-cur­few hours oc­curred on main roads which car­ry a max­i­mum speed lim­it is 50 kilo­me­tres per hour.

The Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice, Gary Grif­fith, had or­dered Di­vi­sion­al Com­man­ders to in­crease high vis­i­bil­i­ty pa­trols dur­ing pre-cur­few hours to de­ter speed­ing dri­vers who were rush­ing to beat the cur­few time, which trans­lat­ed in­to in­creased un­nec­es­sary risk to both them­selves and oth­er road users such as pedes­tri­ans.

TTPS cur­few an­ti-speed night traf­fic ex­er­cis­es have re­sult­ed in 525 speed­ing tick­ets be­ing is­sued to mo­torists with one dri­ver be­ing caught dri­ving at a speed of 177 kilo­me­tres per hour along the Churchill Roo­sevelt High­way by the North­ern Di­vi­sion Traf­fic Team.

Se­nior Su­per­in­ten­dent of the Traf­fic & High­way Pa­trol Branch, Wayne Mys­tar ex­pressed his dis­ap­point­ment that dri­vers con­tin­ued to en­gage in reck­less road use to “beat the cur­few”.

Mys­tar stressed that once per­sons can rea­son­ably jus­ti­fy to of­fi­cers the rea­son for them still be­ing on the road dur­ing the cur­few pe­ri­od with­out a cur­few per­mit, of­fi­cers can ex­tend a lev­el of dis­cre­tion wher­ev­er pos­si­ble and with­in rea­son.

The pub­lic can al­so call the COVID emer­gency num­ber for as­sis­tance dur­ing the cur­few at 612-3876, 480-2000.

Mys­tar fur­ther added “there is no need to en­gage in un­safe dri­ving which is like­ly to put you, your pas­sen­gers or oth­er roads users in ei­ther the hos­pi­tal or the morgue.”