Life
Broken cable barriers seen in the vicinity of the Golconda Interchange, yesterday.
Plans are under way to replace the highway cable barrier system across the country, with the Ministry of Works and Transport moving forward with the installation of new guardrails before the end of 2023.
A senior ministry representative (who asked not to be named) told the Express last week that it intended to install guardrails at more than five "accident blackspots," including Guaracara, Pointe-a-Pierre, Macaulay, Claxton Bay and at multiple points along the Uriah Butler and Solomon Hochoy Highways.
The installation, he said, was part of a larger move to replace the entirety of the cable barrier system meant to prevent catastrophic cross-over crashes.
The barriers have been struck by vehicles and destroyed along most of the highway. It has been credited with saving lives. In areas where there were fatal cross-over crashes, the absence of the barriers was blamed for allowing the vehicles to cross into oncoming traffic at high speed.
In 2019, Minister of Works and Transport Rohan Sinanan said replacing these damaged barriers was an expensive task that had once been outsourced to a contractor, but later moved in-house to spare some of these costs.
Last week, the ministry representative said that the ministry was finalising tender documents to deliver the new structure to the motoring public.
"We are replacing them in the first instance with guardrails because the issue with the cable barriers is when you have one accident, 500 metres come down and it is not functional any more. When you put the guardrails and there is an accident only the section affected by the accident, one segment comes down. It is something we have to do this year."
"That's the issue we have to make sure that when we fix it we put in a system that will work and has the least maintenance costs. To repair it we will have to stop traffic. That is the product, and we are trying to put the tender documents together now to go in there and make some changes gradually," he said.
The representative said that several of the cable barriers had been damaged as a result of nuisance hits, in which vehicles veered away from upcoming traffic and into the barriers to avoid being hit. This damage, he said, was different from cross-over crashes where vehicles in higher speeds veer from one side of the road to the other.
Though guardrails had an initial higher cost of installation, he said, these barriers bore a lesser life-cycling cost due to reduced maintenance, allowing smaller damaged sections to be repaired individually.
"The guardrails may have a slightly higher initial cost but in the long term when you look at the reduced maintenance, it is easier… You find a lot of the barriers are down because of nuisance hits and that is why we are focusing on the blackspot areas where there is the most amount of cross-over," he said.
Responding to the ministry's plan to move to a steel guardrail barrier system, Sharon Inglefield, president of the Arrive Alive non-governmental organisation (NGO), told the Express that she was in support of any efforts being made to save lives on the nation's roads.
However, Inglefield said that these barriers should be constructed and maintained by international standards in order to be effective.
She said that steel barriers must have attenuators and must be sunk into the roads, avoiding fishtail ends which could prove dangerous to drivers.
"They can cause serious damage to vehicles and occupants. That is really important. A fish tail end is the end of those barriers that looks almost like a fin. We had a crash in Diego Martin where a barrier went right through a vehicle on the four roads highway and it went right through, the driver fell asleep on the wheel. That is because there were fish tails," she said.
Inglefield said that while cable barriers were the most effective in saving lives, she agreed that they were also the most expensive to maintain. In light of a shift to an alternative barrier system, she said, concrete barriers throughout the country were also in need of maintenance,
"They need to also fix the concrete barriers which are not constructed or maintained well. They are supposed to be sealed together. A lot of our funds from oil and gas from petrochemicals have been wasted and mismanaged. We now have to step down and so steel barriers and concrete barriers are the next best step. However, they must be constructed and maintained depending on the volume and speed of the traffic," she said.
At least eight lives were lost from cross over collisions over the past two years, according to Inglefield, including pregnant Chavelle Mitcham whose Suzuki Swift sub-compact crashed into a light pole while she was driving north along the Sir Solomon Hochoy Highway in April.
She said that the Government should not be building more roads before all existing road networks are made safe.
"That is eight lives too many including an unborn baby that could have been prevented if we had a barrier system in place. Crashes or collisions, hot spots and fatalities should be the number one priority, but we don't want to wait for people to be seriously injured or die to erect barrier systems. In Trinidad and Tobago, we should not be building more roads, more networks unless we find the funds to make our existing networks safe. The priority should be on this," said Inglefield.
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