With June being observed as Road Safety and Awareness Month, Managing Director of Grennell’s Driving School has said that to 488 road traffic deaths is too many

He was speaking at the launch of the Crash Free 2023 Defensive Driving Workshop and Road Safety Expo on Tuesday (June 6). The workshop and expo are being spearheaded by the Grennell’s Driving School and their partners, Red Stripe.

“We decided to do this because I was not satisfied with what is happening on our roads. Four hundred and eighty eight deaths is 488 too many,” he said in reference to recent statistics on the road traffic deaths for the year, so far.

“Therefore, I decided that since I can’t force the people that have the power to do certain things, I decided to try something. In Norway, they have 4.5 million people as their population and in 2022 they only had 93 deaths on their roads. We are about three million [in population] and we have 488. If we put our resources, efforts, wisdom, and brilliance together, we can see [the road traffic deaths] going down steadily. It’s not gonna happen over night. It will take everybody coming on board with all hands on deck. We will see a reduction in our road crashes,” he added.

Grennell also stated that one of the other reasons his team decided to execute the workshop and expo is that studies have shown that “approximately 87 per cent of crashes are due to the driver. So, if we can fix the driver, we can reduce crashes by almost 87 per cent!”

Also speaking at the event was Yago Castro, managing director of Caribbean Cement Company Limited (CCCL).

“For us at Cemex/Carib Cement, health and safety are important pillars of our operations and are on page one of everything that we do. Our goal as a company is that anyone who interacts with us returns home safely to their families, which remains true to our aim of having zero loss time incidents. We consider this our moral imperative, which is the reason it is our company’s foremost value and priority,” he said.

Castro spoke of efforts that ensure a healthy and safe environment for their employees, especially those who drive the company vehicles.

“Our contracted drivers participate in our Cemex Driving Academy which includes both theorical and practical assessments to build awareness in the proper usage of our roadways. Additionally, we introduced our driving behaviours monitoring centre and launched our Take Five Book programme, which is a booklet that contains the steps for an incident free journey,” he informed.

The CCCL Managing Director also pointed out the introduction of a rootogram analysis that contains the assessment of a driver’s route and highlights the main risks that can be found on the road.

He shared that the company has equipped trucks belonging to their haulage contractors with cameras and proximity sensors.

“This move,” he said, “aligns globally with Cemex, our ultimate parent company, which utilises these technologies to alert drivers to potential hazards in a bid to promote the target of zero injuries on our roads worldwide.”

Castro also made mention of CCCL’s Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) Awareness programme which often collaborates with the Road Safety Unit (RSU) and targets pedestrians, especially children and the elderly, as well as cyclists to spread a message of road safety.

“Some of the topics covered by the programme include identifying the blind spots of a truck, demonstrating how to keep the minimum safety distance of 1.5 metres and ways to ensure that VRUs are more visible to drivers in the evenings when visibility is poor,” he said.

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