And while there may be a difference on who causes the accidents- no one will disagree that in very many cases it's caused by drunk drivers. We asked Williams how big a problem is enforcement?:
Chester Williams, CEO - Transport
"We have an enforcement problem at the end of the day so many of these accidents are caused by drunk drivers by unlicensed people who don't have all their papers in order or their cycle is not in order, at the end of the day and we spoke about this when you were Compol it is a failure of enforcement why we have so many accidents."
"I will not say that enforcement is not an issue, certainly there is a need to do more enforcement and if you would notice that over the past few months we have stepped up our enforcement from the traffic standpoint, I have said this before and I say this again. Within the transport department or the department of transport, we do not have enough manpower to be able to enforce the laws on our highways as much as we would like to. The amount of Human Resources there is totally inadequate, we have received approval from the ministry of public service to increase that number, when we get those increases it is our intention that we will be able to have traffic officers on our highways on a 24 hours basis. In the meantime we rely heavily on the police and we also rely on the municipal bodies because within the cities and towns it is not DOT that enforces the traffic regulations, it is enforced by the municipal traffic authorities. And so we try to implore upon them to do more enforcement but recently we have teamed up with the police, we have teamed up with the municipal bodies and we are doing check points on the highways we are doing highway patrols and over the past 3 weeks we have issued over 1500 traffic violation tickets. So enforcement is there but as much as we do enforcement we still have to ensure that we do our best to bring our citizens up to speed to be able to understand what are the new laws."
