Vice-Chairman of the National Road Safety Council (NRSC), Dr Lucien Jones, has expressed alarm about the recent spike in fatal accidents, resulting in the deaths of 10 people over the first three days of this month, three more than the seven deaths that were recorded over the same period last year.
“The National Road Safety Council is deeply concerned and alarmed that despite the gains that we have made as a country, in respect of having a new Road Safety Act and an improved ticketing system, some measure of public education through the media;and other important steps that have been taken to reduce road fatalities in this country; since the beginning of April, 10 people have died on our roads, 10 in four days,” said Jones.
“This is a major disaster and calamity. And the options of rescuing the nation from this kind of carnage are not many,” he added.
The St Ann Traffic Department is probing the circumstances surrounding the fatal collision that claimed the lives of two men and a woman on the Dunns River main road in the parish on Wednesday, April 3.
Dead are 41-year-old Robert Muir, 55-year-old Christopher White and 42-year-old Kareen Browning, all of Beacon Hill, Thompson Pen in St Catherine.
Reports are that about 8:30 pm, three vehicles were travelling in an easterly direction along the Dunns River main road in St Ann. The driver of a white Range Rover which was proceeding in the opposite direction, reportedly failed to keep left, and collided with all three oncoming vehicles, resulting in the three fatalities.
Jones is calling on the police to rev up traffic enforcement on the roadways, among other measures by stakeholders to curb fatal road crashes.
“The police need to… we call upon them and they have been doing… they need to increase the level of enforcement on our roads. We must receive the kind of resources from both Government and the private sector to carry out sustained and frequent public educational campaigns in this country. We have to make sure that whatever is left to be fixed in the ticketing system in respect of people not paying their fines at the tax offices, going to court and then getting a summons if they fail to appear in court, whatever is left in the system to be fixed, it needs to be fixed urgently,” he said.
“But all of this seems to be falling on deaf ears in the country as people continue to speed and drive recklessly. We should examine what has happened in the last four days carefully. It’s the common theme. Yes, there are issues in terms of fixing the roads, but the common theme is that people are not staying in their lanes, they are driving recklessly, and they are speeding,” he added.
He also called for the examination of the breathalyser programme.
“We need to ramp up the breathalyser programme in this country. For many countries, a lot of those fatalities are caused by people driving under the influence of alcohol. Based on data, this appears not to be the case in Jamaica.
“But we don’t see any reason why Jamaica should be peculiar and different from the rest of the world. So we need to examine the breathalyser programme much more carefully,” he stated.
“These are challenging times and the entire nation must be mobilised from top to bottom to put an end to this. This madness cannot continue.We cannot continue to lose precious lives like this. And therefore, we are appealing for urgent action to stem the tide of this kind of bloodletting on our streets, and causing grief and pain for families and for the entire nation,” Jones added.
