Our road safety crisis is not really about asphalt and signage. It is about a civic culture that taught us not to wait.
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BY THEON ALLEYNE • LA CARIBEÑA NEWS
Yesterday morning, returning from exercise, a Mercedes-Benz cut across two lanes to push in front of me at a traffic light. She had been driving slowly. The moment she calculated she could make the gap, she accelerated, almost ran me off the road, slotted herself in, and carried that same urgency onto Mandela Avenue until she disappeared.
It was not a near-miss in the dramatic sense. Nobody crashed. Nobody filed a police report. It was the kind of thing that happens to every driver in Georgetown three or four times before lunch.
That is the problem.
The horn is the diagnostic
The Guyanese horn is its own indicator. If the car in front of you hesitates for two seconds at a green light, the horn behind you sounds. Not after five seconds. Not after a polite tap. Immediately, sustained, irritated.
Walk into the Cheddi Jagan International Airport immigration line and the same pattern repeats without a steering wheel. People do not queue. They negotiate the queue. Five strangers will step in front of you between the back of the line and the officer’s desk and behave as if nothing unusual has happened.
I have driven in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and across Western Europe. None of those cultures behave this way. A driver in Toronto will sit through three green-light cycles before touching the horn. A pedestrian in London will stand patiently behind a slower walker on the pavement.
So what is going on with us?
I put that question to a transportation engineer I work with closely. His answer was the most useful thing I have heard about road safety in years.
“The road is just the surface. What you see on it is your society.”
The road as a diagnostic instrument
Transportation engineering is not, as most people think, the discipline of pouring asphalt and painting lines. It is the discipline of designing a system that survives contact with human behavior. The Singapore road network and the Guyana road network use the same physics. The difference between them is not engineering. It is the population each network has to absorb.
Singapore’s road traffic death rate is roughly two per one hundred thousand people, one of the lowest in the world. Guyana’s is closer to eighteen. Trinidad and Tobago sits around fourteen. Jamaica around sixteen. Across the Caribbean and the broader Global South, the gap between us and Singapore is not measured in roundabouts. It is measured in how willing the population is to wait its turn.
Singapore did not arrive at two per hundred thousand by accident. They built it deliberately, over forty years, through three reinforcing mechanisms. Severe enforcement, where running a red light costs a fine large enough to ruin your month and a third offense can put you in jail. Early civic education, where queuing, courtesy, and patience are taught from primary school as national values. And a public expectation that breaking civic rules carries social shame, not just legal consequence. Lee Kuan Yew’s nation-building project explicitly treated the road as a civic instrument. The Singaporean driver was engineered, the same way the Singaporean queue was engineered.
We have not done that work.
A South-South problem with regional consequences
When I raised the horn issue with my engineering colleague, his first instinct was professional caution. The behavioral question, he said, belongs to psychologists. But he conceded the pattern is real, and conceded something more important. This is not unique to Guyana. The same pattern shows up in Port of Spain, in Kingston, in Lagos, in Mumbai, in São Paulo. It shows up wherever a population learned, at some point in its economic history, that waiting your turn means losing your turn.
Brazil offers a useful parallel. Researchers studying Brazilian road behavior have repeatedly drawn the connection between perceived impunity in public life and aggressive driving. When people believe institutions will not enforce consequences, they begin enforcing position for themselves. The horn becomes a substitute for the law. Cutting in line becomes a substitute for waiting for what is owed to you.
“This is not a moral failing of Caribbean people. It is the rational response to a long history of public systems that did not work.”
The economic logic that produced the behavior is older than any of us. But the logic has outlived the economic conditions that justified it. We are wealthy enough, organized enough, and ambitious enough as a region to no longer need this survival posture. And yet we keep teaching it to our children by example.
That is what is showing up on our roads.
What engineering can and cannot fix
Carlyne Stewart’s coverage of Beyond the Wheels 2 and the Guyana Transportation Forum made the case clearly. Road safety is not a single discipline. It sits at the intersection of engineering, public health, behavioral psychology, enforcement, and policy. Lacey Williams’ work with CariTrans on local Caribbean data made the related point. We do not yet have the granular regional data to design interventions that actually fit the population we are designing for.
Both observations are correct. Both are necessary. Neither is sufficient.
You can engineer a perfect roundabout and watch Guyanese drivers cut across the painted island anyway. You can install red light cameras and watch motorists run them at four in the morning when nobody is looking. You can publish all the data CariTrans can collect and still have a hospital emergency room full of preventable trauma every Saturday night.
“The engineering is upstream of the law. The law is upstream of the culture. The culture is the thing we have not addressed.”
What a moral revival actually looks like
When people hear “moral revival,” they think of religion. That is not what I mean. I mean a national project, deliberate and sustained, to rebuild the civic muscle of waiting, courtesy, attention, and consequence.
Singapore did it through compulsory civic education and strict enforcement. South Korea did it through similar means in the eighties and nineties. Japan never lost it. The mechanism is not the point. The seriousness is.
For Guyana, the work would look something like this. Civic discipline curricula in primary and secondary schools, not as a one-week module but as a continuous thread across years. A road safety enforcement regime with real consequences, where fines hurt enough to change behavior and courts process violations promptly. A Beyond the Wheels-style national conversation that runs annually, with engineers, physicians like Dr. Anderson at the National World Safety Council, behavioral psychologists, communications specialists, defensive driving instructors, and former diplomats in the same room. Public service announcements that name the behavior plainly. The horn that did not need to sound. The line that did not need to be jumped. The lane change that did not need to happen.
This is fifteen to twenty years of work. There is no shortcut. The engineer I spoke with corrected me when I said five years. He said the timeline for generational cultural change is closer to two decades. He is right.
The cost of not doing it
The road safety statistics are only the most visible cost. The horn culture costs us productivity, because sustained low-grade stress is a measurable economic drag. It costs us tourism, because visitors notice even when they do not say so. It costs us self-respect as a society, the quiet recognition that we are capable of behaving better than we do.
The deepest cost is the children watching from the back seat. They are learning right now. They are learning that the way to get what you want is to push in. They are learning that horns substitute for patience. They are learning that the rule applies to everybody else.
If we do not interrupt the lesson, they will teach it to the next generation. The Mercedes-Benz that almost hit me yesterday will hit somebody’s daughter tomorrow.
Singapore proved a population can be engineered toward dignity without surrendering its character. The Caribbean has the same raw material. What we have lacked is the willingness to name the problem honestly and the patience to fix it slowly.
The horn is telling us something.
We should finally listen.
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Theon Alleyne is the founder of La Caribeña News and EICCIO Advisors. Beyond the Wheels 2, the Guyana Transportation Forum, convenes with Dr. Anderson, Eric Kipps, former Ambassador Conrad, and Carlyne Stewart among the speakers. Coverage continues at lacaribenanews.com.