Every year, the National Road Safety Council (NRSC) pledges that it wants to reduce the number of people who die on the roads in this country. And it has not been for a lack of trying on their part why they have failed to achieve their targets.

In addition to the fact that a great number of drivers on Jamaican roads are either illiterate or just dunce, there is yet another factor contributing to the carnage on the nation's roads.

horn erupts

Try being at a traffic light or any intersection at any time of day and you will get an idea of what that factor is. Just yesterday, I am at the intersection of Waterloo Avenue and Waterloo Road and there is traffic buzzing by at the rate of knots. It would be suicide to try and go out into the flow, especially these days when nobody eases up to let anyone by. So as I patiently wait for there to be a break in the flow of traffic, the blare of a horn erupts behind me.

I peered into my rear view to see a taxi driver pressing hard on his horn. Had you seen him in isolation you would have thought he had a bad case of the runs and he needed to get to the bathroom in a hurry. However, I was not about to have him force me out into traffic, so I rolled my window down and signalled for him to come around and venture out on to Waterloo Road where he was more likely to get splattered like a bug on a windshield. I think then whatever little common sense existed within his peanut-sized brain kicked in and he realised that it was not safe to venture out.

I come across this type of behaviour every day - and not just from cab drivers. To be fair, the majority of cab drivers, the ones I know, are pretty responsible people. But there are people out there who seem to be in a hurry no matter what.

A couple of weeks ago, I was heading to Dover - it was a Sunday and I was driving through the Bog Walk Gorge at about 50 kph.

blind corners

Apparently, I was going too slowly as people were overtaking like they heard that someone was giving away oodles of cash in Ewarton on a first-come first-serve basis. They were overtaking around blind corners like they were on a straight and there couldn't possibly be anything coming in the opposite direction.

It is this impatient, this growing inability to wait that I believe is a major cause of accidents, fatal ones, in Jamaica today. Nobody can wait, and there is this mad rush to get from point A to point B. Even a simple thing like allowing someone out from a minor road is a difficult task for many drivers these days.

Sometimes there is a space of just about a car length developing in traffic, but the driver who is behind would die before he or she allows someone to use that space to merge with traffic.

Somehow, falling one additional car behind is going to kill us. It's absolutely nuts!

And when you hear about fatal accidents on the highways, it almost always involves someone overtaking at an inappropriate spot, or doing something crazy because the driver couldn't wait.

When I was a young driver, I was often told it was better to get there a little late than not get there at all, but apparently, those words mean nothing to drivers these days. It's almost as if they rather die racing to their respective destinations as opposed to anything else.

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