Badly surfaced and irregular roads with no safety railings or reflectors are a chief culprit in Bermuda’s fatal crashes, charged Leopold Kuchler, past president of the Bermuda Taxi Operators Association.

The taxi organisation is now headed by Derek Young.

Mr Kuchler spoke out in the aftermath of yesterday’s unveiling of a new road safety strategy by Police.

“This is reality and I am facing it every day as a taxi driver,” said Mr Kuchler, who maintains that cat’s-eye reflectors might have averted a recent fatality on Paynter’s Road in Hamilton Parish, and that uneven surfacing may have contributed to another road death on nearby Harrington Sound Road.

Mr Kuchler further pointed to the lack of railings or reflectors on the curvature of South Road in the vicinity of Mid Ocean Golf Club, where a motorcyclist lost his life in 2012 after driving over the embankment.

“The only thing you have to go by on that road is the centre line, and it is not reflective at night,” he said. “This is the issue; our roads are bad.”

Reflectors are in use on Longbird Bridge and a hazardous stretch of Middle Road, Southampton, near Five Star Island, but Mr Kuchler said the Island’s heavily used roads warranted more.

He listed the lack of side and border lines, the unpainted wooden railings alongside many roads and the varying widths of roads that change “inexplicably and dramatically”.

Freshly paved roads are left without centre lines, he said, while others — such as South Road near Devonshire Bay — have been resurfaced poorly, resulting in patchy surfacing and loose grit that can cause skidding.

“It’s not speeding alone or intoxication,” he said.

“There are many aspects to this that we need to correct. My problem is, where are the investigating officers after these accidents in reporting it?”