Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan has re­vealed that track­ing down dri­vers who have amassed enough de­mer­it points to war­rant a sus­pen­sion of their per­mits has been dif­fi­cult.

Speak­ing at Ar­rive Alive’s com­mem­o­ra­tion of World Day of Re­mem­brance for Road Traf­fic Vic­tims yes­ter­day, the min­is­ter said an ef­fort is now be­ing made to im­prove the process of serv­ing mo­torists.

On Fri­day, the TTPS stat­ed it served a let­ter of dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion to a dri­ver who had amassed 124 de­mer­it points.

Un­der the cur­rent de­mer­it point sys­tem, dri­vers face a six-month sus­pen­sion should they have 10 de­mer­its, a full-year sus­pen­sion for 14 de­mer­it points, and a two-year li­cence sus­pen­sion for 20 or more de­mer­it points.

De­mer­it points re­set for dri­vers if they go two years with­out amass­ing fur­ther points.

How­ev­er, Min­is­ter Sinanan said track­ing down dri­vers who should be sus­pend­ed has not been easy.

“One of the chal­lenges that we had is that, yes, we pick up the in­fringe­ment. It’s record­ed on their points, but the law is that we have to serve them a no­tice to say why we should not can­cel the per­mit. It has been a chal­lenge in find­ing some of these peo­ple and some of the ar­eas that they live in, be­cause we utilise TTPOST to do that,” he said.

But the min­is­ter said an ad­just­ment will be made.

“So we have now looked at that sit­u­a­tion, and we have put cer­tain things to cor­rect that,” he added.

De­spite this, Sinanan said the sys­tem ap­peared to be work­ing, as, since its im­ple­men­ta­tion, there had been a re­duc­tion in road fa­tal­i­ties. How­ev­er, he ac­knowl­edged that road deaths in­volv­ing pedes­tri­ans in­creased this year.

“We have seen some sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tions. How­ev­er, this year, what we have seen is in­crease in the pedes­tri­an fa­tal­i­ties. We have had re­duc­tions in the dri­vers, in mo­tor­cy­cles, the cy­clists them­selves, as well as the whole—we have seen sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tions. But on that as­pect of cit­i­zens cross­ing the high­ways, we have seen a 57 per cent in­crease in that,” ex­plained Sinanan. He lament­ed the rise in pedes­tri­an deaths was oc­cur­ring de­spite more walkovers be­ing con­struct­ed to en­cour­age few­er in­stances of peo­ple cross­ing high­ways.

Mean­while, Ar­rive Alive Pres­i­dent Sharon In­gle­field again called for fur­ther en­force­ment of traf­fic laws.

“I think we need a lot more en­force­ment out there. We need to make sure the po­lice have the speed guns and the cal­i­brat­ed breathal­y­sers to en­force our law. We re­al­ly need the of­fi­cers out there do­ing their job and liv­ing up to their re­spon­si­bil­i­ty be­cause we’ve had an in­crease, so, the work in progress has to be more ro­bust. There­after the dri­ving cul­ture will change,” said In­gle­field, who urged mo­torists to prac­tice more jour­ney man­age­ment for the up­com­ing Christ­mas and Car­ni­val sea­sons.

She al­so ad­vised pedes­tri­ans to avoid wear­ing dark cloth­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly when walk­ing at night.