In view of the danger speeding poses to road safety, the World Health Organisation (WHO), in collaboration with four global partners, recently launched the second edition of a Speed Management Manual which it hopes will help curb the burgeoning scourge of road traffic deaths and injuries through managing speed on the world’s roads. That event, held on November 23, was a prelude to yesterday’s debut of the WHO’s Global Status Report on Road Safety, which details the scale of road traffic deaths, as well as the progress made in advancing laws, strategies and policies to reduce them.
It is worth noting here that in August 2020, the United Nations designated 2021 to 2030 its second Decade of Action for Road Safety, with the express hope of preventing at least 50% of road traffic incidents that cause injury and death, by 2030. The first Decade of Action – 2011 to 2020 – had not realised the reduced levels of road fatalities that the international organisation had envisaged. This was possibly because the approach by individual countries to enforcing speed limits and other actions that could address the issue comprehensively had remained desultory.
Speed kills. This dramatic two-word sentence has headlined millions of road safety campaigns around the world. So much so that it has perhaps become clichéd to the point where one might question whether anyone still hears and recognises its inherent truth and takes it into consideration.
In way too many countries in the world, ours included, the set speed limits basically mock the salient value of this approach to road safety. Worse still, in the main, drivers tend to treat the speed limit as a suggestion rather than a traffic law that must be obeyed. The universal practice which has grown over the years of letting drivers go with a caution the first time they are caught speeding has proven to be detrimental to road safety. Yet it continues. Research done in various places has revealed that almost 100% of cautioned drivers went on to speed again.
This column has expatiated ad nauseam over the years with regard to the link between speeding and traffic incidents that result in serious injuries and fatalities, often with emphasis on alcohol-induced speeding. For the most part, the response by the Guyana Police Force has been to maintain the status quo. This involves a series of campaigns throughout the country during which speeding drivers and those caught operating a vehicle while under the influence are either ticketed or charged. It appears that there is a set quota and once this is met, it’s back to business as usual, or what amounts to drag racing on the country’s roads with deathly consequences. The frequency of the latter has reached near-epidemic proportions.
A typical example was this Sunday’s crash that has so far claimed four lives. As reported in this newspaper on Monday, the driver of a minibus transporting passengers along the East Bank Demerara was speeding and collided with a car at Friendship. The chain reaction resulted in two more cars being hit. The subsequent loss of control saw the minibus toppling several times before it came to a halt. When it did, the driver was dead, and so was one passenger. Another passenger, who had been hospitalised, succumbed on Monday morning and another on Tuesday.
A week prior, on December 3, an 18-year-old who was speeding along the East Canje roadway in Berbice in a minibus drove into a heap of sand and lost control. He was flung from the minibus and died. The lone passenger was injured. This incident teemed with illegal conditions that made it a disaster waiting to happen; from the age of the driver to the speeding to the sand on the road. It is perhaps ironic that just days before, on December 1, several members of the GPF Traffic Department concluded a training programme on road crash investigations hosted by a specialist from the United Kingdom. Or maybe not as it would appear that the focus of the GPF is more post-crash than crash prevention.
The policing model here seems to be one that is anchored in whatever mandate is presented by the government. This is not unusual and it is likely with this in mind that the WHO has targeted governments with its Speed Management Manual. This document embraces the fundamental concept that a vehicle at a certain rate of velocity will inevitably spiral out of control when it hits an object. In every crash, it is the speed at which the vehicle is travelling that determines the severity of injuries sustained and/or the likelihood of fatalities. It therefore urges governments to create a Safe System geared to managing speed, which recognises among other things that humans, vehicles and road infrastructure must interact in ways that ensure a high level of safety.
While police forces will always have a huge role to play in enforcing road safety, it goes beyond that. There is a lot that has to be achieved at the policy level; laws will need to be enacted or amended. It will be necessary to extend public education, which is perhaps the crux of the matter, to make road safety part of schools’ curricula. The actions governments take will depend on the circumstances in individual countries. Obviously, there can be no one-size-fits-all approach.
Finally, it must be said that nothing outlined by the WHO is foreign or new to us in Guyana. The inability to effectively curb speeding and lack of effort placed on definitively addressing the horrific loss of life on the country’s roads defines those who govern us as apathetic. It is not a good definition.
