The Trinidad and Tobago Police Service announced the deployment of new Lidar speed-monitoring devices for use on the country’s highways, the Trinidad Guardian reported, marking the first significant equipment upgrade to the country’s speed-enforcement programme in several years. The devices replace a fleet of older radar units that had been the subject of repeated criticism from both motorists and the courts.
The enforcement context matters. Trinidad and Tobago has one of the higher per-capita road fatality rates in the English-speaking Caribbean, with stretches of the Solomon Hochoy Highway and the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway repeatedly identified by the TTPS and the Ministry of Works as enforcement priorities. The Lidar deployment is part of a broader package that includes expanded camera coverage and stricter prosecutorial follow-through, and the government has pitched it as a public-safety investment rather than a revenue measure.
Whether the deployment shifts behaviour depends less on the equipment than on follow-through. Lidar tickets are more legally defensible than older radar readings — a known weak point in prosecutions — and that change alone may meaningfully alter how motorists respond. Police Commissioner Allister Guevarro has separately appealed to citizens not to take justice into their own hands, framing the enforcement upgrade as part of a wider rebuilding of public trust in policing.
Source: Trinidad Guardian, May 12, 2026.