MOTORISTS BEWARE, the Barbados Road Safety Association (BRSA) has a laser speed gun and they are not afraid to use it.
President of the BRSA Sharmane Roland-Bowen said they received the gun from an overseas benefactor and they planned to use it to conduct surveys on how swiftly motorists move through residential and school districts.
“What we at the association will be doing very shortly is conducting three surveys – a speed survey around neighbourhoods and schools; a distracted driving survey which would tell us how many people drive while using their cellphones and we want to do a survey on rear seat passenger safety.
“We need to get figures to work with and we have been given a speed laser gun from a US company and that is what we will be conducting our surveys with around residential areas and schools,” she said.
Roland-Bowen was speaking to the Press yesterday during a defensive driving course in the CGI Insurance building, Collymore Rock, St Michael, in partnership with the CGM Gallagher Group, represented by vice president of regional claims at CGM, Tito Gulstone.
“This is all about presenting to our clients the benefits of road safety and defensive driving practices. We are insurance brokers and we believe in promoting things to reduce their risk exposure so this is one of the platforms which can achieve this,” Gulstone said.
CGM gathered representatives from 13 companies to participate in the course. Gulstone said it was in an effort to start something tangible.
“We hope to be catalysts for the embracing of a new culture as we see it as very important in mitigating loss of property and life. Hopefully we can have buy-in from the wider insurance community so we can at least put things in place to encourage defensive driving and this is just the beginning for us,” he said.
In addition, Roland-Bowen said the causes of road accidents were too subjective and could not speak to the root causes.
She said more needed to be done other than simply punishing offenders and suggested that there should also be a reward system for good drivers. (CA)
