New electric buses, transit authority on the way

Prime Minister Mia Mottley says 100 electric buses should arrive from China by early next year – and a new transit authority would oversee them.

The disclosure came as she responded to St Joseph residents at their Parish Speaks town hall on Wednesday where they complained of poor bus service.

Delores Thompson of Melvin Hill said that although new buses had been acquired by the Transport Board over the years, the service to the area has worsened.

“For Chalky Mount, after 7:30, you have to wait till
9:30. After 9:30 you have to wait till 12 o’clock,” Thompson said of the outbound schedule. “Before you got the [new] buses, you used to have a 7:30 bus, an 8:30 bus, a 9:30 bus, [an] 11 o’clock and a 12 o’clock bus that goes to Sugar Hill and Chalky Mount. [Now] if the 7:30 bus [misses] you, you got to stand up by the Globe or all along Hindsbury
Road to wait till 9:30 to get another bus. I don’t think that is fair.”

Mottley said an acquisition deal for buses had been agreed on with Chinese officials, and promised the coming Mass Transit Authority would institute changes to the public transport system to help better service routes.

“The number of buses is a significant number because when I went to China, I spoke to them about it. We have been in negotiations about it, and we are looking at 50 of the bigger buses and 50 of the smaller buses. So you are not talking about an insignificant number, but in the interim, the Transport Authority has to work with those who have licences to be able to appropriately allocate them to routes, rather than people only being on routes that they feel are profitable. That has to be a condition [when] we move forward.

“[Transport Minister Santia Bradshaw] should have [for] us by the middle of the year, I hope, the framework for the Mass Transit Authority, which will better manage the deployment and allocation of buses to routes,” Mottley said.

Further details on the new organisation, expected to merge the bus operator Transport Board and regulator Transport Authority, were not provided. 

(SB)