Before they took their rental mopeds out on the roads for the first time, local livery cycle operators in the 1960s and ‘70s used to remind wary visitors that Bermudians drove on the left side of the road. At least until the bars closed. Then they drove wherever the hell they liked.

Back in the day this caution was considered an exercise in gallows humour and tended to elicit a few nervous chuckles. Now it’s taken on the aura of prophecy. And absolutely nobody is laughing.

While criminally reckless driving can be witnessed on Bermuda’s roads at any hour of the day or night, the most shocking examples — and the very worst accidents — invariably occur in the early morning hours.

Is anybody now safe on our roads after the bars have closed? This question has invariably come to the fore after a bizarre weekend accident — one involving two hit-and-run car drivers — which left a motorcyclist dead and her pillion passenger in hospital with serious injuries.

La-Nae Woodley, 22, was Bermuda’s fourth road fatality of 2015. The precise circumstances of her death are now a matter for the Police and the courts to determine.

But it’s fairly obvious to even the most casual observer that many of those driving in the early morning hours are well over the legal alcohol limit or are operating vehicles while under the influence of illicit drugs. And it’s after midnight, of course, that Bermuda’s police resources are stretched to their absolute limit.

The existing laws already provide for stiff fines and, when appropriate, jail terms for those convicted of serious traffic offences. Bermuda’s problem is not so much the need for harsher punishments but the need to catch those who break these laws with absolute impunity and who demonstrate total contempt for both the rules of the road and other road users.

Obviously a heightened police presence on the roads after midnight, more speed traps and the introduction of random roadside breathalyser tests would quickly tame — if not eliminate — the mayhem.

But in these days of tightened budgets and reduced police manpower, the chances of such a comprehensive traffic safety enforcement effort being launched any time in the near future are probably minimal unless Prospect’s finances are boosted.

Obviously we can never depend on all of Bermuda’s drivers to change sometimes literally breakneck habits of their own volition.

A tiny minority of our drivers will always be capable of causing carnage on a scale far outstripping their numbers once they combine alcohol or drugs with high speeds.

Only a strictly enforced zero-tolerance policy for driving under the influence will curb the unacceptably high number of fatal and near-fatal accidents Bermuda is now contending with.

Most of Bermuda’s roads are little better than paved cart tracks which were never intended to carry anything more than the slow-moving one-horsepower traffic we used almost exclusively until 1946.

Narrow and winding at the best of times, even straights are known to turn into bone-jarring switchbacks with no warning, veering off at entirely impossible angles. Such a meandering network does not easily lend itself to the increasing large, increasingly high-powered cars and motorcycles we are putting on our roads.

So exercising caution at all times is both an obligation and an increasing necessity for every single one of Bermuda’s drivers. But caution, of course, never factors into the blurred thinking of those who get behind the wheels of their vehicles after numbing their critical faculties to the point of insensibility with alcohol or drugs.

Bermuda’s road traffic safety campaigns and educational programmes have been demonstrated to raise awareness and, ultimately, to save lives. But there will always be those among us who learn nothing from such undertakings because they remember nothing — including the lessons provided by tragedies such as the one which played out at the corner of Cobbs Hill Road and Middle Road early on Saturday morning.

We need increased law enforcement as well as an increased awareness of our laws.

Finding the money and the manpower to launch a far-reaching crackdown against drunk and drugged drivers — particularly those who take to the roads at weekends — won’t be an easy or a quick process. But it’s an absolutely necessary one if we are to take back our roads from intoxicated motorists who really do drive wherever the hell they like.