Another Bermudian has tragically lost his life on our roads. He was a friend of mine, someone I had the greatest respect for, someone who was genuinely a shining light within our community. His passing is heartbreaking and, unfortunately, it is also part of a growing pattern that Bermuda can no longer afford to normalise.

We are now facing our eighth road fatality of the year before we have even reached the halfway point of 2026. The Bermuda Road Safety Council described the most recent losses as a “painful reminder of how fragile life can be”. At the present pace, this could be one of our deadliest years on the roads in decades.

This is not new. In December 2017, then-transport minister Walter Roban said plainly: “Bermuda road crashes and fatalities truly is an epidemic in this country and must be addressed.” Nine years later, those words remain unanswered.

Despite years of increased enforcement, more police presence, traffic operations, public campaigns, and now traffic cameras, road fatalities continue at an unacceptable rate. Recently retired Chief Inspector Robert Cardwell, of the Bermuda Police Service Roads Policing Unit, acknowledged it himself: “The collisions can only be fixed by education,” and the culture of impaired driving, he has said, is something “policing alone will not get rid of.”

If the head of our Roads Policing Unit is telling us enforcement alone cannot solve this problem, why are we still treating enforcement as the answer?

At some point, we must stop pretending incremental measures are enough and start having honest conversations about solutions that are evidence based, practical, and long overdue.

One of those solutions is mandatory full-face helmets.

I am not the first to make this case. In February, 2013, Joseph Froncioni — an orthopaedic surgeon, former chairman of the Bermuda Road Safety Council, and later appointed MBE for his contribution to road safety, with the headline taking about helmet safety.

Dr Froncioni’s question then is still the question now: “How many road deaths do we need for our politicians to summon up the courage to address the problem?”

I spent more than 20 years in emergency services as both a firefighter and paramedic. I have attended countless serious collisions and have seen devastating facial trauma, traumatic brain injuries, cervical injuries, and fatalities first-hand.

This is not theory to me. This is lived experience.

Multiple international studies show that riders wearing full face helmets suffer substantially fewer life-threatening head, facial, and neck injuries. If a simple legislative change could reduce catastrophic injuries and deaths by even 20 or 30 per cent, how can we continue refusing to act?

Bermuda also needs an honest discussion about emergency medical capacity.

Our EMTs, firefighters, and frontline responders work extremely hard under difficult conditions. This is not a criticism of the people doing the work. It is a criticism of a system that has not kept pace with demand. When I served on the Bermuda Fire Services board, the department was understaffed by more than 40 positions — a level of shortage that inevitably affects training, fatigue, and response capability.

We must be serious about staffing the ambulances, the fire service and also adding paramedics to Bermuda. For a country where we can afford the best of the best, not having paramedics on the road and in our communities is doing our citizens and guests a massive disservice. The capabilities they bring, providing hospital level care on scene, is desperately needed and something found in every First World country around the world.

At the launch of the Bermuda Road Safety Council’s five-year plan this month, Celeste Maycock, a consultant emergency physician at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital, said it directly: “We are talking about a system stretched. We are talking about lives interrupted … because every crash impacts all of us.”

More than 1,000 crash victims pass through her emergency room every year.

Strengthening that system also means strengthening what happens when our hospital has done everything it can. Critically ill patients in Bermuda can still wait many hours, sometimes days, for overseas air ambulance transport, and those delays affect outcomes, place pressure on ICU capacity, and create enormous strain on the healthcare professionals working to stabilise patients while awaiting transfer.

This is one of the reasons I became involved in helping build Bermuda Air Ambulance — continuing work that civic-minded Bermudians such as the late Eloise Bell cared deeply about. Ms Bell founded Bermuda Air Medivac in 2004 because she understood, long before many of us did, that Bermudians should not die waiting.

A full-time, on-island air ambulance capability is one of the most impactful healthcare investments Bermuda can make. It strengthens our healthcare resilience, improves continuity of care, dramatically reduces transfer delays, and gives critically ill patients a real, measurable chance of survival.

The clinical, humanitarian, and economic case is compelling — and this is a moment where government, insurers, healthcare providers, and the broader community have an extraordinary opportunity to come together behind an initiative that will save Bermudian lives for generations to come.

Road safety cannot rely solely on punishment and enforcement. It requires education, culture change, infrastructure improvements, better protective equipment, stronger emergency medical systems, and political courage. We once had preventive programmes such as CADA’s free late-night taxi service to combat drink-driving, alongside rider education initiatives supported by local sponsors.

We should be expanding such programmes, not letting them fade away. Most importantly, we need to stop treating these deaths as inevitable.

Every road fatality represents a human being who mattered deeply to someone. Every single one leaves behind grieving parents, spouses, children, siblings, team-mates, co-workers, and friends.

Walter Roban called it an epidemic in 2017. Dr Froncioni was asking in 2013 the same question we are still asking now. Robert Cardwell is telling us, in 2026, that enforcement alone cannot save us. Dr Maycock is telling us our hospital is stretched.

The voices have been speaking for over a decade. The dead cannot speak. So we have to.

My friend deserved better. All of them did.

• Gilbert A. Darrell is a former firefighter and paramedic with more than 20 years of emergency services experience. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Emergency Management and is one of the founders involved in developing Bermuda Air Ambulance, an initiative focused on strengthening emergency medical transport and critical care co-ordination for Bermuda