Island Traffic Authority Rolling Out Road Safety Intervention

The Island Traffic Authority (ITA), through its Fatal Five Road Safety Intervention Strategy, will be targeting high-risk behaviours to improve road safety.

Director General of Road Traffic at the ITA, Lieutenant Colonel Sheldon Bryan, told JIS News that an analysis of road fatalities conducted by the Authority revealed that the five major causes of deaths on the roads are excessive speeding, improper lane use, improper overtaking, pedestrians walking in the roadway, and unsafe right turns.

He also highlighted the challenge of motorists and pedestrians failing to properly judge the distance and speed of oncoming vehicles, particularly when turning across traffic.

“We’ve now narrowed down these five fatal causes for accidents by road, by hotspots, by week and by day, based on how the data over the last five years suggested to us,” Colonel Bryan said.

“So, what we’re doing now is, we’ve established a task force that will be doing joint operations with the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) Public Safety and Traffic Enforcement Branch (PSTEB), and they’ll be going around… using the data to do operations,” he added.

The Director General explained that the targeted operations will focus on speeding and vehicle maintenance to ensure roadworthiness.

He also informed that the ITA will launch a massive public education campaign targeting motorists and road users across the five key focus areas.

“The public education campaign [will] educate the public about how to use all roadways, whether it’s the pedestrians and all those motorists on the road, enabling them to understand how these five causes impact the society,” Colonel Bryan stated.

“We have started some of our deployments at the hotspots. We did a soft launch this week, working on the operational deployment/functionalities with the police, doing all the coordination. We wanted to start early… getting into the festive season, because this is the time you have a lot of DUI (Driving Under the Influence), [and] this is the time that people start the excessive speeding coming out of the party season,” he added.

Colonel Bryan further stated, “we’re looking to officially launch the fatal five public education campaign and the increased deployment for the spot checks with the police next week Thursday.”

Meanwhile, the Director General explained that the ITA is not legally authorised to conduct spot checks without the presence of a police constable.

“So, we’ll be doing the inspection, and the JCF will be out there looking at the speeding… looking at the improper use of our roadways. We’ll be out there talking to pedestrians, engaging with them, as we look at the five fatal causes [of accidents],” he stated.

“We’ll be out there in a mobile way as well. So, not just passing along the roadway. We’ll be driving on the roadway, speaking to motorists that we see committing these infractions and the police will be there to ticket and take the necessary enforcement action,” Colonel Bryan added.