Road Safety and Road Reality

Let me begin by explaining that this is intended to make you think.

Perhaps it’s another example of the good suffering for the bad? There are terrible accidents out there, most attributed to speeding, where drivers and pedestrians alike are dying, and infrastructure – street lights, signs, etc – are being mowed down. But like the rapper DMX said, guns don’t kill people – people kill people. So unless those cars are driving themselves, the problem lies with the human side of things, and the social mechanism that places un-trained, un-skilled and un-ready drivers on the road, and pedestrians who feel they can, should and will walk on the road rather than on the adjacent sidewalk.

Cars nowadays are built better than ever, and can, under normal conditions, perform better at higher speeds, with stability control, anti-lock brakes, power steering etc. Yet we have an inane speed limit that puts us at a 50km/hr restriction, where even police cars and other government vehicles etc are routinely cruising well above this. And when the law-abiding old lady actually follows this limit, she creates a line of traffic behind her that stretches 10 cars deep, with the taxi man at the back overtaking the lot, right into oncoming traffic, or diving into the 3rd car from the front, or into the crowd of schoolkids walking home.

Without building more and wider roads, or slowing the influx of vehicles coming in to Jamaica, traffic will get worse, especially if we assume that everyone exhibits rational behaviour and travels at the speed limit, with not a single vehicle exceeding this. Low speed may not be equated with safety, certainly not when you look beyond individual scale (see my old lady example above). The over-loaded truck carrying aggregate from St Thomas is certainly not speeding. But it’s causing serious damage to the road that it’s traveling on, that has a domino effect of the road surface condition that translates itself to all road users. Or that broken down gas truck on Mt Rosser.

Our own vehicle testing and drivers’ licensing programmes are flawed and certainly out-dated with the times, both in terms of the evolution of technology since those rules were developed, and the realities of society, where everything can be circumvented. And traffic police need to develop common-sense approaches to dealing with these realities.

Different vehicles are built differently. Some can handle speeds better than others. When drivers don’t know this, or choose to ignore this, the vehicles they’re in become ticking time bombs. In public passenger vehicles, when buses and taxis are both routinely over-loaded and speeding, it’s a metter of when, not if, an accident will occur.

So where are the passengers in making noise about this? Why aren’t they stopping the drivers from doing this, or reporting this to the police? Do the police care, or would they actually do anything about it? Or are the passengers more happy for a cheap fare than their own safety?