Insurance association cautions reckless road users

Insurance administrators are warning motorcyclists to take their stunts and general reckless driving off the highways.

President of the General Insurance Association of Barbados (GIAB) Randy Graham disclosed on Monday that the conduct displayed by many of these cyclists was making accident victims out of safe drivers.

“If these guys want to do stunts and speed and so on, they need to take it off the normal traffic roads. They could take it to places like Vaucluse, Bushy Park, or some other place to do their stunts. It must be threatening or illegal to use the roads in that way,” Graham told Barbados TODAY.

He said the insurance industry gets lots of complaints about motorcyclists speeding, driving without headlights, performing stunts next to other road users with the excessive noise produced by the cycles posing major distractions.

“We get non-stop complaints about them all the time, and we try to pass them on to the authorities to be able to do something about them,” he said.

The insurance executive said members of the Barbados Police Service have been responding and doing their best within the limits of their available manpower.

“But without knowing when these guys are going to try something…if the police are not there to see it or there to attack it, there is not a whole lot you can do. They are not doing it with the police around. I know the police are trying to increase vigilance and we appreciate that. This really gets down to people taking personal responsibility,” Graham declared.

“The issue really is, the distraction that they cause. For the best drivers, you are trying to pay attention to the road and focusing on what is in front of you, but when you get these guys coming alongside of you and the things are noisy and then they themselves are creating a distraction in front of you, that is what’s really causing the accidents,” the general insurance sector leader stated.

Graham said insurance companies want to see greater control on the roads.

“Motorists don’t have a problem sharing the roads with the motorcyclists, but when they are doing these stunts, and the noise that the vehicles cause, it is very distracting to the normal driver…and we really don’t want them sharing the road in that way,” the spokesman contended.

Graham also revealed that it was unlikely with “a handful” of accidents that there would be increases in motor insurance premiums across-the-board.                       “A handful of accidents wouldn’t affect everybody overall. If it gets as significant an event as when we had the unfortunate Joe’s River bus tragedy which went into the tens of millions of dollars in settlement, then you might get an impact on the whole industry,” said the association president.

“But you really wouldn’t get everybody’s premiums being impacted if you had a handful of accidents like what is happening now. These things normally have their little cycles. So you get unfortunate spikes sometimes and then they would settle themselves down. What we hope is that the cycle with the spike is not as long as the cycle when it is quiet,” he said.

“What happens is if you get the losses in any one year going above the tens of millions of dollars, then that’s when you get everybody impacted because it is too much to sustain,” Graham stressed.

There have been six road  deaths so far this year  from six road traffic collisions. (EJ)