We've told you about the launching of the Belize Road Safety Project. It is a CDB funded initiative, which seeks to decrease Belize's abnormally high traffic fatality rate.
The project seeks to improve sections of the Western Highway between Belize City and Belmopan, and to increase enforcement on this part of the road.
But, in order to be effective at enforcement, the facilitators of the project believe that the authorities must practice what they preach. To that end, they've started a workshop called Defensive Driving, to teach them how to become better drivers, and how to become motorists that the public will respect.
7News stopped in today, and we spoke to the Trainer, who says that defensive driving is really just the exercise of common sense – which we all know is not too common:
Dennis Molina - Trainer, Defensive Driving
"We don't change attitudes - we cannot change that, you need a psychologist. We are trying to make people be self-disciplined and not be an aggressive driver - be defensive because it's a benefit for all road users. There's nothing much to it, you just have to be disciplined in all you doing - for instance you know that answering a cell phone while you're driving causes destruction. While you're looking and not looking ahead to what is going on is also a distraction and by the time you look round in a split second. Secondly, driving is a full time job - once you are driving a vehicle - you are continuously under full manners. There are a lot of things that you have to watch, like the atmosphere, you have to watch smog, smoke, road condition - when to ease up the speed and you have to know what to do, several little things just use your common sense."
Daniel Ortiz
"If I understand correctly defensive driving training here is for these different traffic managers to display a model behavior while they are on the road."
Dennis Molina
"That is exactly it - we have to develop because you know how people are - for instance you see a man do something and you don't know if it's right or wrong, you wonder what happened and then you become curious and then you start to ask why they did that to you and then you say well that man knows what he's saying to you."
Ronald Crawford – Belize City Traffic Officer
"We would like to become a leading organization especially when it comes to traffic enforcement - we are trying many different ways in how we would like this operation to work."
Calvin McCoy – Belize City Traffic Officer
"We have learnt the safety distance that you need - you need to look at least 12 seconds in front of you so that you know different things. We've learned about the roundabout because a lot of people in Belize do not know how to use a roundabout so we learned a lot of different things."
The training continues tomorrow, where the participating government departments will also take part in practical aspects of defensive driving.
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