Not only will there be increased patrols and checkpoints, but violators may be sent straight to court. Additionally, the traffic officers have already begun targeting hotspots where accidents tend to occur, or where people can be found drinking and driving. Deputy Chief Transport Officer Peter Williams told us more today via Zoom.

Peter Williams, Deputy Chief Transport Officer
"We have been observing all the demand from the public to increase enforcement and so what we did is that the strategy that we will now be employing when it comes to enforcement will be that we will be taking persons directly to court. We have found that when we issue traffic violation tickets persons believe that they don't have to pay these violation tickets so in addition to the issuance of the violation tickets, we will be taking persons directly to court. That is not to say that we won't be issuing traffic violation tickets because we will be but we will have a percentage of the offenses that we encounter that we will issuing summons for those offenses."

"We started off, we launched our enforcement operation last week actually. We started in the northern districts, primarily focusing on Corozal because we do know that around this festive season, we have a lot of persons traversing over to the border, coming back over to Belize, under the influence of alcohol and so we launched the operation in that area because we recognize that that is also one of the hotspots for road traffic collisions but yes we're also looking at the highway from between Belmopan and the Benque Viejo border as well and we're also looking at the highway between Belmopan and Belize City and certainly between Belmopan and Stann Creek District, between Dangriga Town. Those are traditionally and also based on the data the areas that always see large numbers of road traffic collisions and the areas that we will be targeting."

"I wanted to underscore with that operation alone, within less than two days, we have, the officers who were involved in that operation, they issued over 400 traffic violation tickets just within a period of two days thereabout. So that underscores the fact that there are several offenses being committed on our roadways and the volume that we dealt with during that time is still not proportionate to the amount of offenses that were there because as an example, during the operation, we had 13 officers out there for the operation and at any given point in time, all of them were writing violation tickets and so while they were occupied writing violation tickets, we saw persons passing the checkpoints committing like seatbelt offenses and other offenses so that is to show you that there is a large volume of offenses taking place on our roadways and the department is committed to trying to get this issue of road traffic offense under control."