‘Is buy di licence buy’
MANY YEARS ago, a call came from the Ministry of Labour to see if I could find nine persons with clean records, genuine general driver’s licences to be considered for employment as tractor/trailer drivers in the USA. What an opportunity for inner-city men, I thought. Much more money than farm work. Few people are as naturally skilled as a well-trained, disciplined Jamaican operator.
My search was futile. There were multiple applicants but as many impediments. The main one was “is buy di licence buy”. Most had never had a proper course of driver instruction because it was unaffordable or unavailable, were illiterate, or had a record of smoking weed. Some had tried at the examination depot a few times, failed, and had resorted to paying a man to get through. It used to cost $12,000 for a permit to drive private vehicles. The money went up to pay for a bigger licence. The price has probably increased since then.
Only three of those who desperately wanted the work could qualify. The others no doubt continued to drive with their bad habits, to the nation’s peril.
June is Road Safety Month and we are going through the usual hand-wringing about road fatalities, thankfully less so far this year than the outrageous bloodletting last year. The minister of transport stretches his credibility, and our credulity, by promising that, two years after passing the Road Traffic Act, the regulations to make it effective will “soon” be ready for approval. Even if that is so, the law alone won’t be enough.
The truth is that we continue to joke around people’s lives. There are thousands of drivers on the road who should never be there, because they have never been taught properly to safely operate a potentially lethal instrument like a motor vehicle, or who, by defect of personality, physical or mental disability, are unfit to drive. Who really cares?
INADEQUATE LAW
After all, the law is chronically inadequate; the police overburdened, and sometimes complicit; the insurance companies complacent; and the Road Safety Council apparently resigned to the murderous situation.
We are importing over 40,000 more cars each year. There must be close to a million vehicles on Jamaican roads. Are we training, certifying and recertifying even that many new drivers every year? And what about the tens of thousands of motorcyclists, most of whom have no training and no insurance?
A permit to drive a motor vehicle is no longer a lifestyle need for the relatively few in Jamaica. More than a million of us require one right now, with a similar number aspiring to qualify. Teaching people to drive safely should be a requirement of all high schools and HEART Trust training programmes. HEART has the money to anchor this process right now. Prime Minister, what good fortune that you are in charge of HEART as well being chair of the Road Safety Council!
Driving is a lifetime skill which even the poorest candidate will contribute to pay for: the same one who scrapes up thousands for once-off graduation events. Properly done, learning to drive can be used to instil disciplines otherwise absent. As it is, where are we taught the huge difference between defensive and aggressive operation of a car, truck or bike?
Further, driver training and certification ought to include psychological assessment. Highly impulsive, pathologically angry and addicted persons, no matter their technical skills, are dangers to themselves and others. When they transgress safety rules, a fine from the court, that extension of the tax office, neither addresses their problem – nor ours.
A conviction for careless or dangerous driving must carry with it a mandatory module of attitudinal adjustment and skill refresher paid for by the miscreant. Impose that and watch road safety improve – at no cost to the State. A new industry – not a state bureaucracy – can develop to deliver operator-capacity standards, subject to government regulation.
Further, at intervals of 10 or 15 years, licence renewal must require retesting. As people age, their eyesight, hearing capacity, reflexes and mental health all change. These faculties seriously affect driving capacity. It can take up to three or four hours (in the Corporate Area for certain) to renew a permit for five years. Better to use such time for reappraisal and, where necessary, to prescribe remediation.
The ‘new’ Road Traffic Act is in danger of being ineffectual – even before it comes into effect. Stop weeping about road fatalities and fix the root of the problem: absent or inadequate driver education and appropriately strict standards of certification.
That these radical but entirely achievable measures are not even fully discussed, acknowledged and treated by the Government, insurers and road users, points to a disregard for life and limb which spills over into so many other behaviour patterns of Jamaican society. So if “a buy di licence buy”, a no nuttin!