Beyond the rain: The ethical implications of undisciplined driving

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Character is not built under pressure; it is exposed by it.

When the afternoon showers swept across Kingston last Friday, the city did not simply grind to a halt. It staged an unrehearsed public confession. From Constant Spring to Cross Roads, from the ministry-issued SUV mounting the curb to route taxis forcing gaps no reasonable person would call lanes, the collective response to two hours of rain revealed something no engineering report can fully capture.

The rain did not cause the gridlock. We did.

There is a familiar habit – among individuals and institutions alike – of locating the cause of a crisis in the most visible and least personal factor available. We blame flooding, faulty stop lights, inadequate drainage, or the sudden surge of vehicles trying to leave the city at once. These are real factors, but they are not the root. Beneath every standstill lies a cascade of individual decisions, each privately rational and collectively catastrophic, made by drivers who decide that their progress outweighs the ordered welfare of all. That is not merely a traffic problem. It is an ethics problem – and ethics, at its foundation, is a formation problem.

From the senior citizen in the battered Lada to the professional in the late-model Porsche, the logic was strikingly uniform. Everyone had somewhere important to be. Everyone’s destination justified the shortcut whose cost would be quietly distributed across dozens of immobilised vehicles behind them.

Aristotle observed long before the first traffic light, that virtue is not a single decision made under pressure, but a habit cultivated through countless ordinary choices until it becomes an automatic response to disruption. What Kingston exposed last Friday is that we have not been cultivating the civic virtue of disciplined movement. We have been cultivating its opposite.

This is not merely a Jamaican failure. It reflects a deeper pathology: the deformation of the self in community. People who have never internalised genuine regard for the neighbour will not suddenly produce it at a flooded intersection. What unfolds on our roads is what was formed – or left unformed – long before anyone turned a key.

This is why undisciplined driving is a justice issue, not a nuisance. Every blocked junction extends the commute of the nurse who cannot be late, the parent racing to collect a child, the worker who cannot afford another lost hour’s wage. The harm is real, quiet, and disproportionately borne by the most vulnerable.

Kingston will flood again. The question is not only how we engineer our roads, urgent as that work is, but whether we are willing to admit that a city’s traffic is a living portrait of its moral culture – and that no flyover can substitute for the harder work of forming people who understand that shared space demands shared regard.

The road is a classroom. Last Friday, we failed the exam. The next lesson is already scheduled.

TEDDY A. JONES