It’s a shame the graduated licensing programme isn’t a go come 1 July.
We’ve already had eight people die on our roads since December, and we’re only six months in to the year.
Most of those who died are young people; people inexperienced behind the wheel of a motorized vehicle.
Graduated licensing is a step-by-step programme that young drivers will have to complete prior to earning a full driving license.
After taking a written test to earn a Teenage Learner’s Licence, young drivers would be given a certain amount of time to clock road hours with a qualified professional driving instructor.
And there is the rub.
We don’t have enough qualified driving instructors to get the programme going.
Frankly, we don’t understand the hold up.
The leaders of this country and those behind MattSafe and other safe driving programmes have been talking about a graduated licensing programme for years,
It was made part of the islands’ traffic law in March 2005 and should have been implemented at the start of this year.
Two years is plenty of time to find qualified people to teach proper driving etiquette and techniques.
While we can sit back in the Monday’ morning quarterback chair and berate those who haven’t implemented the programme, we can be thankful that they haven’t rushed the idea and put in unqualified people to train young drivers.
This is a major step for our country; it has to be done right.
We’ve got to have enough professional, qualified driving instructors to make this programme work.
Government has been requested to make sure we have enough by the end of the year to get this programme started. We hope they do as requested.
We can’t have another year like 2006 when a series of deadly crashes took the lives of many young people in their teens and early 20s.
We’ve already had too many deaths and potentially deadly crashes on our roads this year.
And it is still young people who are crashing and dying.
It’s got to stop.
Messages issued by police and through this newspaper don’t seem to be doing the trick.
We hope the graduated licensing programme will.
And we hope it comes into effect soon.
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