Michael Weeks, the Minister of National Security, said road safety was a national crisis, citing “very alarming” statistics of traffic offences and deaths.

Speaking in the House of Assembly on Monday, Mr Weeks floated suggestions of temporarily painting all of the island’s centre lines yellow to discourage overtaking or limiting motorcycles to 50cc to reduce speeding.

“Maybe it’s worth a try, because clearly what we are doing is not working,” Mr Weeks said.

“We are losing our men and women, young and old, to the roads. From where I stand, this is a national crisis. We talk about it, but we don’t give it much thought after reading in the newspaper that another person lost a life.”

He noted the death of his own son in a collision on Christmas Day ten years ago, saying that he and his family feel his loss every day.

“The pain is insurmountable and the lasting thoughts never end,” he said. “I am a member of many clubs, but this is a fraternity that no one ever wants to become a part of, having to deal with the reality that they have lost someone to our roads.

“I don’t have the answers. The answers are not going to be easy. Some of the answers may be far out, but we as a community have to recognise that the carnage that is happening on our roads is a national crisis.”

Mr Weeks said that figures showed that enforcement alone will not address the issue, highlighting the thousands of traffic tickets and arrests that have been made in recent years.

“Since 2015 there have been over 49,000 tickets issued for driving offences. In that same eight-year period, over 14,000 cautions were also issued for driving offences,” he said.

“That’s 63,900 times someone has got caught. Sadly, we still see the offences on our roads.”

He said that during the same period 1,900 arrests were made for impaired driving, 89 people lost their lives on the roads and 769 road traffic collisions that caused life-changing injuries.

“The numbers would be much worse, but during this eight-year period we had three years of Covid,” Mr Weeks said. “And we still have alarming numbers of fatalities and road accidents that were life-changing.”

He said that everyone has a part to play in making the island’s roads safer, stating that one moment of inattention can result in serious injury or death.

Mr Weeks added that the number of people arrested for driving while impaired had shown that the message was still not getting through to everyone

“Drinking and driving puts not only your life at risk, but the lives of other road users,” he said. “This is completely and utterly unacceptable.

“I implore everyone to take responsibility for their own actions and don’t put others at risk. We have to take these numbers to heart.

“These numbers that I have recited are people. These are our family members.”

So far this year, four people have lost their lives on Bermuda’s roads — more than one a month.

Craig Cannonier, of the One Bermuda Alliance, agreed that action must be taken to address road safety and curb the tide of speeding on the roads.

“We are seeing it play out in front of us. We are losing people unnecessarily,” he said. “Any life lost doesn’t speak well for our future in Bermuda.”

It followed a call by the government MP Wayne Caines during the Friday night debate saying he had been reflecting on the island’s fourth road death of the year.

“We have become so familiar with people dying on our roads that it does not make a blip,” Mr Caines told the House.

“Nobody gets concerned about it. We are in March and we have had four road fatalities for the year.”

He said that “every single day we see traffic advisories coming out where traffic is being diverted because there has been a significant accident” — and that people could regularly be seen “coming like bats out of hell, driving as if they have a death wish”.

“If this were any other country, they would call it a national health crisis.”

Mr Caines added: “Something has to be done. Four lives in March is too much. As a country we must see this as a national health crisis.”