Dear Editor,

It is time to have a serious public discussion about the causes and possible solutions to the chaos on our roads. We complain and point fingers, but there seems to be little real analysis of the matter.

Allow me to draw our attention to a few issues impatient of debate. How can a driver accumulate hundreds, if not thousands of tickets and still be on the roads? Clearly, whatever system we have to identify and apprehend them is not working. Can we design a workable system to apprehend these “chaos producers”?

There is little point complaining about bad driving when we are unable to find and punish bad drivers. Let’s set to work on such a system immediately and stop relying on “buck ups” to find them. As things stand, this terrible deficiency in enforcement allows these guys to simply throw away the tickets and continue on their merry way. They figure that they’ll get away, and even if they’re caught the penalties are relatively minor.

They’re correct! They have an incentive to run up an enormous number of tickets.

A man with over 1,000 tickets outstanding might be fined $50,000, which works out to $50 per ticket. Is that a disincentive? The average motorist, on the other hand, might have a single ticket, yet be fined upwards of $5,000. Even suspending their licences achieves little. They’ll just continue to drive on the same expectation that they won’t be caught.

We are seeing the consequences of a failure of law enforcement. When these 1,000-ticket guys are caught, they are invariably taxi or bus drivers, often racking up several tickets per day. If they should be brought to book and treated like the average motorist, even the existing penalties would bite. Imagine catching them as soon as they’re issued, say, 10 tickets, and charging them just like the average motorist? It would probably see them brought in weekly and charged $50,000. This would quickly put a stop to their kamikaze-style driving. We desperately need a system that links motorists to tickets issued.

It is wrong for the Government to control the taximan’s income through the fare structure while leaving him fully exposed to costs. Politicians might not wish to grant fare increases because they’re sure to be unpopular, but to stick the driver with that bill is immoral.

Michael Nicholson

mnicholson@utech.edu.jm