Now a days I open my eyes closely monitoring the happenings in SI via media and its regretful indeed to note that traffic accidents have increased to an alarming rate this year. Many were innocently either killed or disabled due to careless driving by few individuals. I therefore would like to join in hand with others who have contributed their views on the above sensitive matter.

Anyway, I firmly believe that projecting our town in all means is a cooperative effort, by working together to identify and solve problems, we can make our future city of Honiara a better place to live and work.

Without doubt, traffic accidents are the most life-threatening even. Fortunately, there is a lot we can do to minimize the odds of being in a collision.

Firstly, I believe that its timely for the ministry responsible to take heed about the on going traffic problem occurrance in Honiara from been worsening in the future especially as now both our population and town are gradually increasing and expanding. One of the pragmatical ways is to establish appropriate driver`s training schools in the country with proper training, timing and strictly accepting admission of right age group into the institution. I highly reccommend a year of proper training and admission age of 18 or more plus reasonable licence fees are some of the conditions and requirements that need to qualify someone before issuing a driving licence. For an instance, in Japan as far as know, it takes 1 year period or more to do training and it costs more than $25,000SBD from the very beginning of training to getting the licence. These are some of the tough measures taking to prevend Tom, Dick and Hurry from easily issuing a driving licence. I mean a reasonable training and driving licence fee is viable according to our local situation and not just $100 or even less as currently existed in SI.

Additionally, there should be reqular monitoring of drivers performance by responsible authorities making sure that the message of 'safe driving' do not fall on the deaf ears but rather stack right inside the mind of every vehicle license holders . The simple idea of Safe driving isn`t just navigating your car through town when nothing unexpected occurs, though, its driving in an alert manner, keeping an eye out for problems and prepare to respond. But in actual fact, this is opposite for most of our local drivers now a days.

Further more, if possible I think establishing of traffic lights and crossing lanes need to be established at the most needed places along the Honiara street. If my memory still serves me right, once upon time a traffic light was built near the old central market but not longer after it was disappeared as it has been vandalized by few selfish idiots. I salute the effort of those who came up with that idea in the past.

To be always on the safe side, all children, women and men alike and general public as a whole should be well educated on traffic rules so that they aware of when and where to do crossing or stand and walk on the road of Honiara street.

I do not blame any particular party for the failure of responsibility such as drivers and responsible authorities, nor any individuals for the on going traffic problems in SI but its an everyones duty and responsibilty. Together we will build our town and nation a safe place to live.