Ocho Rios hub of daredevil speed
Published:Friday | December 11, 2020 | 12:15 AMNadine Wilson-Harris/Staff Reporter
Motorists travelling through the northern Jamaica resort town of Ocho Rios have come under the radar for daredevil speeds at more than four times the incidence in the nation’s capital.
A recent experiment found that while between eight and 10 per cent of motorists in Kingston speed, the figure is as high as 42 per cent in Ocho Rios.
Michael Saunderson, operations manager at the National Works Agency’s Traffic Management Unit, said that data were obtained from cameras mounted at several locations across the country.
The cameras had a wide range of data capacity, include capturing speed, the running of red lights, lane violations, and average speed monitoring.
In sections of Negril, out west, about 30 per cent of motorists were found to be speeding while 25 per cent were guilty of the same offence in Montego Bay.
The highest speed measured was between 140 and 160 kilometres. In some of the areas surveyed, the established speed limit was 50 kilometres per hour.
“What is different about Kingston is that it is a small number of violators, but those violators have repeated offences … like 56 times we captured them speeding,” said Saunderson.
“From that data, we actually confirmed what, anecdotally, we have already known: that Jamaicans like to speed,” he asserted during a road-safety webinar hosted by the Inter-American Development Bank and the National Road Safety Council of Jamaica on Thursday.
Saunderson did not give the timeline for the experiment but said it has been concluded.
The findings will strengthen advocacy for the use of technology to monitor the behaviour of reckless motorists. There were 400 road fatalities as at December 8, two per cent, or 10, fewer than for the corresponding period in 2019. Data from the Road Safety Unit show that 130 crash victims were motorcyclists, 83 pedestrians, 30 pedal cyclists, and 18 pillion passengers.
Data indicate that Trelawny, St James, Hanover, and Westmoreland have accounted for 32 per cent of the road fatalities so far this year while Clarendon, Manchester, and St Elizabeth contributed to 19 per cent of deaths. St Andrew North, St Catherine North, St Catherine South, and St Thomas accounted for 20 per cent of crash fatalities.
Westmoreland has recorded the most road fatalities this year at 57, while Kingston Central has the fewest, four.