IN my long columnist career, I cannot remember the times I have written about the foolishness and tragedy that accompanied such a silly mentality of young men who own large motorcycles and believe Guyana is like large countries like the US and Canada where you can open up and ride at a fast fate, feel the wind in your hair and the thrill all over your body.

Such young men who felt like that have died over the past 40 years in Guyana and in large numbers. I have seen a couple of those accidents. The last one was at the junction of the East Coast Highway and Sherriff Street, right at the junction. The motorcyclist was almost beheaded. I won’t describe the body I saw because discretion prevents me.

You cannot go full throttle on your bike because our highways cannot accommodate such high-speed riding. Our highways evolved out of the villages along the East Coast, East Bank of Demerara and West Coast of Essequibo. It is unbelievable ignorance for any motorcyclist not to know from Vreed-en-Hoop to Parika; from Subryanville to Moleson Creek; are all areas of thriving population centres and there are no long miles of deserted highways where you can enjoy the thrill of speed. It is risk going through hundreds of villages at high speed; you will encounter cyclists, animals, and people.
The point so far is that Guyana’s highways are where people live. When you modify your motorcycle exhaust, and rev it up at 1 AM, you are going to disturb thousands of sleeping humans. This is what has been happening outside Movie Towne at midnight on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. This has been going on for more than a year now and there has never been one traffic cop in sight.

Here is what these motorcyclists do. They start from outside MovieTowne onto the Railway Embankment and turn from Ogle and come back to MovieTowne. The noise from the modified exhaust wakes up the folks living from Pattensen to Ogle on the Railway Embankment. For months now, a man modified the engine of his car and each weekend at around midnight, he drives from Movie Towne to Ogle and back on the Railway Embankment and the vehicle, designed to make a screeching sound, gives off unbearable noise
This country has a small population and every aberration or scandal Georgetowners hear about. Is the police force saying that they don’t know about the screeching car and the motorcycle gangs outside MovieTowne on the weekends? None, not one of those cyclists has a helmet on. It forces you to ask the question – where are the traffic cops in the night-time?

I go to the National Park each morning and you cannot miss the traffic ranks on the highways. Each morning I see traffic ranks stop the drivers of those heavy trucks; sometimes there are heated exchanges. I go to the seawall each afternoon, and when I am returning in the evenings, I never see, let me repeat, I never see a traffic rank on the East Coast Highway between 7 PM and 8 PM.
The Ministry of Public Works has banned heavy-duty trucks from using the Railway Embankment. Since that edict, every night those trucks drive by my home. Here is my theory. The drivers know the ranks are not on that particular highway in the evenings and indeed they are not. My verandah looks directly onto the Railway Embankment.

Here is a dimension of the missing nocturnal traffic ranks that is hard to accept. All the time, and I don’t mean episodically, I see the anti-crime ranks on their motorcycles from Impact Base of the Brickdam Police Station, stopping motorcyclists for not wearing helmets. Many times it would be a husband and wife couple going to work. Of course this is in the day.

If the police want to catch riders without helmets, then they should go outside Movie Towne in the late hours of the evening from Friday to Sunday, and they will find about 25 motorcyclists riding up and down the Railway Embankment and not one has a helmet on. So you pick on riders in the daytime and when night comes you vanish.

I went to speak to the ranks from the Sheriff Security company on duty in the MovieTowne complex. I told them about the loud music from the car stereos in the midnight hour from the parking lot of Movie Towne. I was told that when the ranks approach these people, they become abusive. So where does that leave the cancer of noise nuisance?