Today, the Minister of Transport, the Honourable Owen Darrell, joined the Minister of National Security, the Road Safety Council and the Bermuda Police Service for a joint press conference focused on Bermuda’s growing road safety concerns. The briefing comes amid a series of serious and fatal collisions, with officials addressing the condition of our roads, the behaviour of motorists and the need for greater responsibility and safer driving practices.
Here’s what Minister Owen Darrell had to say.
The current situation: every life matters, and road safety belongs to all of us. We are here following another terrible loss of life on Bermuda’s roads, and I want to acknowledge the families, friends and communities who are grieving. Thirteen people have now lost their lives on our roads this year. For an island of our size, that is simply too many, and the loss of even one life is unacceptable.
The government has a clear responsibility to act, but road safety is also a shared responsibility. The choices each of us makes about speed, distraction, drinking and driving, and how we use our roads affect everyone around us. This therefore needs both a whole-of-Government response and a whole-of-Bermuda response.
We are acting now, while also doing the work needed for longer-term change. Longer-term change does not mean waiting to act. There are things Government can and is doing now. You will hear about increased enforcement today, while the Road Safety Council continues its immediate public awareness and education work. At the same time, we are looking more closely at what is driving serious collisions including causes, when and where they occur, and the age and gender of those involved and progressing work on speed cameras and other policy and legislative options. There is no single measure that will solve this. Enforcement, legislation, education, safer roads and vehicles, and changing behaviour all matter. We need immediate action alongside a sustained approach that reduces deaths and serious injuries over time.
This is a shared Government responsibility and we are organised accordingly. Following the twelfth road fatality, Minister Robinson Perinchief and I convened an urgent meeting here at TCD on Monday, bringing together Transport, National Security, the Bermuda Police Service, the Road Safety Council, Health and Public Works. We brought together the work already underway, agreed our immediate priorities and strengthened our coordinated response.
Transport will continue to lead road safety policy and strategy, the Road Safety Council and related education and policy work. National Security and the Bermuda Police Service have critical responsibilities for enforcement and operational policing, while Health, Public Works and others also have important roles. The priority is making sure all of these efforts work together responding with urgency now while building the sustained approach Bermuda needs.
One area where the public quite rightly wants to know what is happening immediately is enforcement.
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