Drive like lightning, crash like …
DAVE LEFT his company’s Christmas party at about 5:30 last Sunday morning. As he moved out of the Golden Triangle and made the turn on Eastwood Park Road and ‘shot it like a bullet’ in his very expensive high-end SUV towards the northern end of Red Hills Road, something in his head told him that he was speeding and needed to slow down.
Further up the road, a blue van pulled over by the fruit and vegetable vendors in separate stalls. Those in front of PriceSmart. It was about 5:40 a.m. as I stood by my car door that I saw tragedy, its escape, and an immediate recovery from a state of drunkenness.
Someone left the blue van, and as it pulled away slowly, too slowly, and for too long a moment it occupied the middle of the road, Dave’s car sped towards it at about 70-plus miles per hour. In less than the blink of an eye, many things, driven by sheer instinct, happened, seemingly all at once.
Dave was trying to stick to his left side of the road, but had he done so, to gain sufficient space for passage he ran the risk of a head-on with a nest of concrete poles. Quickly, he braked, shifted his steering to the right, and as the car skidded towards the vending stalls, Dave relaxed on the brake and miraculously brought the car fully under control about 50 metres up the road.
Both drivers stalled their cars as there were hardly any other moving vehicles on the road. They looked back at each other and probably gave thanks that they would get to see Christmas. One vendor who I spoke with said, “Mi hear the brakes bawl out, but mi back did turn.”
From where I viewed it, he would not have even known what hit him had the fates acted unkindly.
In the tranquillity of a beautiful Jamaican morning in the season of Christmas, even when there is hardly any traffic on the road, we are trying to kill off ourselves. In the half-hour I spent talking to acquaintances, the subject was bad driving and the snarl of traffic at PriceSmart.
PriceSmart needs to explain
If the immediate universe of Jamaica existed inside of the unwieldy and very heavy traffic headed into and exiting Price Smart on Red Hills Road, one would believe that Jamaica was a nation of big spenders.
PriceSmart operates on the members club basis where for a fee of a few thousand dollars, one is supposed to get special deals on prices. This is not a commentary on the business model, but from all indications, it is a big success.
The question begging to be asked is this: When PriceSmart was being built, did the engineers attached to the building firm, and the planners at KSAC, conveniently forget that even with additional parking facilities installed, the pressures on the general travelling public would be unmanageable, especially at Christmas?
“Three hours from Half-Way Tree to Chancery because a traffic at PriceSmart,” said a taxi man to me last Sunday.
Why should the travelling public silently absorb the painful inconveniences while PriceSmart shoppers fill their baskets and the company smiles all the way to the bank? Surely, there must be something tangible that the KSAMC can extract from the huge supermarket.
Should we assume that the six or seven policemen placed there a few days ago in an almost futile attempt to bring order to the traffic were paid directly by PriceSmart?