BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE • TRANSPORTATION • INTERVIEW
A Conversation with Lacey Williams of CARITRANS
BY THEON ALLEYNE • LA CARIBEÑA NEWS • MAY 27, 2026
In most parts of the world, the rule of thumb on car insurance is simple. Younger drivers pay more because their reflexes outrun their judgement. Older drivers pay less because experience compensates for slower reactions. The Caribbean has imported the same rule. Lacey Williams, Managing Director of CARITRANS, the transportation engineering consultancy he founded in Trinidad and Tobago in 2012, is not so sure the rule survives contact with Caribbean data.
That line is Williams’ diagnostic verdict on a region that has spent two decades borrowing risk models from elsewhere and applying them as though local conditions were the same. He delivered it in a conversation with La Caribeña News this week, ahead of his speaking slot at the Beyond the Wheels road-safety forum at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre in Georgetown, Guyana, on October 6 and 7.
He is a civil engineer with twenty-five years in the field. His academic foundation is a Bachelor’s from the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, in 2000, followed by a Master’s in transportation engineering from Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 2011. He returned to Trinidad and Tobago after Howard to start CARITRANS in 2012. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. His additional credentials include road safety auditing training delivered through the UK’s Transport Research Laboratory, an iRAP Centre of Excellence whose Safe System methodology underpins many of the audits he now runs across the English-speaking Caribbean.
His client list reads like a CARICOM tour. Belize, Barbados, Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago. CARITRANS itself, through its previous partnership with Atlanta-based GMB Engineers & Planners, brought a combined seventy years of transportation engineering experience to projects from small municipal traffic studies to multi-island road-safety audits. The firm has been a technical adviser to the National Road Safety Council in Trinidad and Tobago, where it worked on general safety issues, including red-light-running mitigation, speed control, and the behavioural research that informs both.
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THE INSURANCE QUESTION
The insurance question is where Williams gets sharpest. His starting point is uncontroversial. Reflexes do slow with age. His dissertation research at Howard, he said, traced exactly that pattern in driver-response data. Drivers over 55 take longer to react to a sudden stimulus, whether that is a traffic light changing or another driver making an unsafe move. Younger drivers, by contrast, have faster reflexes but less judgement.
What complicates the picture is what comes next.
The young driver assumes the reflexes will save them, takes the chance, and sometimes pays for it. The older driver knows the reflexes will not save them, declines the chance, and avoids the crash. Two age groups, two different risk profiles, two different failure modes.
So the insurance pricing question becomes harder than the brochure version. If the 50-year-old has slower reflexes than the 25-year-old but takes fewer risks, who is the better risk to insure? Williams’ answer is that the question itself is too generic.
The data to answer the question properly does not always exist in the region. “In our neck of the woods, sometimes they don’t have sufficient data to support your theories,” he said. That is the structural problem behind a lot of Caribbean road-safety policy. Without local data, decisions get made on imported assumptions, and the assumptions do not always travel well.
Williams pointed to a concrete example from his own design work. As a traffic signal designer, he designs the timing intervals at intersections to match the population that uses them. Twenty years ago, that population at a particular intersection might have had a median age of 40. Two decades later, the same residents are now 60, with slower reactions and possibly diminished sight. The signal timing was never updated to reflect the demographic shift. Crossings get harder, red-light running becomes more common, and accidents increase in the absence of any other rule violation. “The person has a clean driving record. They may not have committed a breach at all, but for the fact that you may not have considered that particular aspect, there’s an increased risk.”
The point is not that signal design should be perfect. It is that signal design should be revisited. Williams’ implicit benchmark for that work is a regional one.
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BARBADOS AS THE REGIONAL MODEL
“Barbados is commonly known in the transportation engineering industry as the roundabout capital,” he said. The label is partly literal. Barbados has more roundabouts than most Caribbean territories of comparable size. But Williams’ interest in Barbados is less about the roundabouts themselves than about what the country does with traffic data more broadly. From his direct experience working with engineers at Barbados’ Ministry of Works, he sees a pattern other islands could learn from.
The compliment is specific. Williams cited Barbados’ attempt to use data systematically to understand what is happening on its roadways and to adjust signal timing patterns accordingly. That data-first practice is not yet the regional standard; Williams treated it as the standard the region should aspire to.
The roundabouts themselves carry a separate lesson about driver behaviour. A roundabout only works if drivers understand the convention for entering, yielding, and exiting. Williams said he has observed instances across the region where the geometry was correct but the behaviour was not, producing the kind of intersection chaos that engineers describe diplomatically as “less than desirable.” A roundabout, in other words, is not a guaranteed safety win. It is a system that requires its users to learn a new behaviour, and the behaviour has to be taught.
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THE STAKES
Both points sit underneath Williams’ broader concern. Road safety in the Caribbean cannot be improved by importing whichever international best practice is most fashionable that quarter. The improvements come from collecting local data, designing for local demographic realities, and educating local drivers in the conventions they encounter.
The regional traffic-fatality picture demands the investment. The Pan American Health Organization reports that traffic crashes claim over 145,000 lives every year in the Americas and cause at least 4.1 million non-fatal injuries, including more than 638,000 serious ones. The current Latin America and Caribbean road mortality rate sits at 14.09 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. To meet the global commitment to halve road traffic deaths by 2030, the region must reduce that rate to 6.73 per 100,000. “For every death, there are 28 injured people, four of whom may suffer permanent consequences,” Ricardo Pérez Núñez, PAHO’s Regional Advisor on Road Safety, said in a July 2025 PAHO/WHO statement.
It is exactly that gap Williams said excites him about the October Beyond the Wheels conference in Georgetown. He wants to be in the room because he sees a persistent disconnect between what road-safety research recommends and what road users actually do. The way to close that gap, he argued, is education that travels.
What hangs in the balance is not abstract. It is the difference between a family that gets home and a family that does not.
TAGS: Road Safety • Caribbean • CARITRANS • Transportation Engineering • Beyond the Wheels • Interview