Rising discourtesy among bus drivers and taxi drivers

Dear Editor,

Our Guyanese nation needs a tremendous amount of help in the area of Road Courtesy. Who is responsible for imparting this to this category of our citizenry? This help is very urgently needed.

This is very evident at the traffic lights from day to day, or if a courteous driver on the road makes one of the perceived mistakes e.g.

signals that he/she is stopping to permit an old man or woman, bent in half and using a cane, to cross the road.

signals that he/she is stopping to permit a resident to exit his home in his car, as his home now happens to be on a main roadway leading to a traffic light.

signals that he/she is stopping to permit one or two little children whose height may be shorter than the windscreen of the driver’s car.

signals that he/she is waiting for the vehicles in front of him/her to move ahead if the traffic light has just changed to green.

What happens on our roads is that these discourteous drivers, who are all in a hurry to arrive somewhere and think that you too should be, press their horns continuously until the vehicles in front of them move out of their way. Dave Martins cleverly referred to this alleged disease as “hornitis.”

Editor, who is responsible for training our bus and taxi drivers? The need for this type of training is very urgent. These drivers are

giving our country a bad name

killing and maiming several and

making the rest of us drivers ill at ease as we wait in green light queues.

Editor, we should not be promoting Tourism with little or no attention to Road Courtesy.

Guyanese, let us condemn this behaviour with the same verve with which we are condemning Domestic Violence. But let us do more than this as well.

Let us suggest how these two groups can be trained.

A very concerned citizen

Yours faithfully,
Joyce Sinclair