"Police and Government last night renewed their calls for safer driving after the third young Bermudian in 11 days was killed on the Island's roads." - The Royal Gazette, August 18, 2003

TWO events earlier this week prompted me to think about life in Bermuda.

The first took place at White's new supermarket on the baselands. As I stood in the check-out line, a young couple in front of me became more and more upset at how long the whole process was taking, especially the man.

He was right on the brink of blowing every fuse in his head at how staggeringly slowly matters head of him were proceeding, so I asked his wife where they were visiting from.

"Connecticut," she said, "and how did you know we were visitors?"

I explained that anyone who lived in Bermuda understood about slow lines at supermarkets, and the like. I explained that the one of the great charms of Bermuda was its slower pace of life and that they should stop to smell the poincianas. It is easier to get out of Westgate than White's Supermarket, I explained, so they should use the time to chat, make new friends, read War and Peace, that sort of thing.

With today's technology, being a checkout person is unskilled work and therefore, presumably, not well paid. The checkout clerks have no incentive to work fast, so they don't. They chat. They natter. They inspect their fingernails; at least they do at White's. The only small mercy is that they don't have telephones at their workstations, or no one would ever get out of the supermarket before it closed at night.

Not much later, the shoe was on the other foot. I was stuck in a sensationally long line of traffic waiting for the swing bridge near the airport roundabout to close, which I found much less amusing than the scene in White's.

With nothing better to do while waiting - nearly 20 minutes - I counted the number of vehicles coming at me once the bridge was finally open. Eighty-five vehicles had been in the line heading into Hamilton. A few hours later, I got stuck at exactly the same place and did exactly the same thing: this time 81 vehicles had been waiting to move in the direction of Hamilton. Using these numbers, I did a little mathematics.

The bridge swings to allow sailors to pass into Ferry Reach. Going the long way round might take, I would guess, three hours. So opening the bridge and letting one boat through each time I was there gained the maritime fraternity, say, 12 man-hours of leisure, since each boat appeared to have two people on board.

Let us take 80 as the average number of vehicles heading into Hamilton who were inconvenienced by the sailors, and assume that half that many were heading out to the east. Let's assume that the average vehicle had two people in it. Let's say, charitably, that they were only delayed 15 minutes on average.

On that very conservative basis (some of the vehicles delayed were buses and taxis, and the wait can be much longer than quarter of an hour), the 12 sailor-hours saved cost 60 lost man-hours (of work, probably) for the drivers. Multiply that up to six bridge openings a day, five days a week, and 52 weeks a year, and we are looking at a net loss of 46,800 man-hours a year.

The average worker puts in 2,000 hours a year of paid work, so the swing bridge costs Bermuda the entire work output of about 23 Bermuda residents every year.

There are compensating factors. Not one of the vehicles waiting at the bridge can commit a speeding offence while waiting, so there is a benefit to Bermuda: the total cost of road traffic accidents can be said to have been reduced by the inconvenience.

Taking this further, however, it could be said that the angry bad driving habits of those forced to wait, once they resume the driving process, might contribute to an increase in road accidents.

Now that we have opened the Pandora's box that is road traffic in Bermuda these days, I have a few things to say on that subject.

In the hand wringing that has followed the carnage of the past two weeks, two simple facts have become clear.

One is that people are driving too fast. The walls of Bermuda's roads and the statistics bear mute witness to that.

Slowing down is not the answer, however. I tried that, driving everywhere at 20 mph, tops. I was lucky to escape with my life, as people went completely berserk when forced to drive at the speed limit, and often took out their feelings on me. Then I tried driving as fast as possible, like everyone else seems to be doing, but that was no fun either. I nearly killed myself and several others on a number of occasions.

The answer is a more visible police presence. We have 419 police officers, apparently, but you never see one of them anywhere near the roads, except for the odd patrol car lurking in the bushes in rush hour, when traffic is forced to a crawl.

We need better testing, too. The present test is a joke, and no one is then re-tested until they are 65. Put in a real test, I say, and test everyone who now has a licence. Half of them would fail, believe me. Most Bermuda drivers can't remember which is the left-hand side of the road and stick to it. None of them, it seems, can find the dipswitch to move their headlight beams from full on into the eyes of oncoming drivers to a more muted direction, groundwards.

Then put some police cars on the road at all hours, in all places. Build the judicial infrastructure to cope with thousands of speeders. Throw the book at anyone exceeding the limit. Speeding would be cut to a minimum, safety would soar, and we'd have time to smell the poincianas.

Tough love? Nope. Criminals should be punished. These lunatics aren't killing themselves, they're killing innocent passengers and bystanders and terrorising the rest of us. It's time to deal them out of the equation.