‘Pirate PSVs cutting in, further depressing transit industry’

The financial fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has so far cost the privately-run public transport sector an estimated $40 million at a time when its complaints and legal affairs advisor is warning of an all-out confrontation with pirate operators who are cutting further into their already slender income.

And while Director of the Barbados Transport Authority Ruth Holder says the problem of the illegal transport operators is being addressed, Head of the Complaints and Legal Affairs Division of the Alliance Owners of Public Transport (AOPT) Craig Banfield is hoping that government authorities and the general insurance industry move speedily to put the brakes on the pirate vehicles.

“The matter has been addressed and is being addressed,” Holder told Barbados TODAY in an interview.

But Banfield, who is already seeing signs of potential confrontation between the legal and illegal operators based on regular complaints and videos received, believes something “chaotic” is about to happen on the streets of Barbados as frustration from the approved PSV drivers and conductors nears boiling point.

“This pirating issue has really escalated since the COVID-19 has come about. What has happened is a lot of persons have lost work or a lot of persons who are not getting the amount of work that they were getting before, whether they were driving a ZM or Z permit for example. As such, they have looked at picking up passengers at bus stops to subsidize their income,” the attorney-at-law told Barbados TODAY.

“But what has happened is that it is causing problems, because you are getting on the routes, a lot of the ZRs and buses who are legally authorized to ply that trade, getting frustrated because the few passengers that they are to get, based upon the reduction of persons not working or children not at school, the pirates are taking up the slack by not allowing them to get past those numbers. They are cutting in where they should not be on the route and therefore causing a lot of hardship on the ZR and minibus men who are already faced with difficulty,” he declared.

“So those operators are getting frustrated and I would hate to see a scene, whereby there is a backlash between the persons who are illegally plying the trade and those who are legally supposed to ply those routes,” Banfield pointed out.

He is also worried that the pirate vehicles, many of which are air conditioned, could also pose a health threat to the commuters in the COVID-19 environment.

“They have to deal with the health issue in terms of sanitizing. A lot of those vans are air-conditioned and if the persons in those vans are masked or the air-conditioned units are working and there are persons who are not six feet apart within those vans, well you know what is possible from a health perspective,” the AOPT official argued.

And in addition to that, the legal advisor stated, these unsanctioned PSVs do not pay the required amounts of Government taxes and high insurance which the registered vans must pay.

“They are paying regular insurance fees, a little $500, $1 000, while our guys are paying $15,000 and $20,000. So you can see where a lot of frustration can come about. It is not fair that this matter is causing this on the road along with all the other issues we already are facing in Barbados. Eventually, something is going to happen. We are trying to prevent something major from happening because we have had videos from ZR people showing other vehicles that are pirating, reversing because they realized they are being video-taped,” Banfield revealed.

Chairman of the AOPT Roy Raphael, who also weighed in on the issue, disclosed that his organisation is about to have discussions with a team of lawyers with a view to taking the Government to court to test the matter concerning the pirates.

“I am not going to rule out the possibility of us doing a case study where the pirates are concerned because the law clearly speaks of illegal vehicles. It appears to me that a number of people in the transport system do not understand the law. So my organisation will soon be speaking with a number of attorneys, headed by our Director of Legal Affairs, and we are going to test this matter before the court,” Raphael told Barbados TODAY.

“This matter has been going on for a while and it appears to us that the time has come to test the matter in court to seek compensation because the Government has a duty of care because once you own the permit, Government has to ensure that you have a right to be safe on the road in terms of competition. And if they are the ones who are the regulatory body and they fail to do that, then we will test the matter before the law court,” the association leader declared.

He revealed that the economic losses to the privately-owned public transport sector since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic has been unprecedented across the board including the Transport Augmentation Programme (TAP), which is a joint arrangement between the state-run Transport Board and private operators designed to move around commuters.

“We lost close to $40 million between the start of the pandemic and now. What Government has done is to give some assistance to the taxi operators, but our fallout is basically because of the number of passengers not travelling on the buses,” Raphael said.

And for the general insurance industry, its chief spokesman is warning the pirates and all other motorists who use their vehicles for purposes other than for what they have been insured, that their policies may be suspended or cancelled.

President of the General Insurance Association of Barbados (GIAB) Randy Graham said while change of use can be accommodated, doing it through the “back door” would not be tolerated.

“You cannot have a private vehicle and use it for rental or other parties, it’s a breach of the policy and we try to stop that; not because we want to be difficult, but because a commercial policy is different from a private policy,” Graham told Barbados TODAY.

Graham has cautioned motorists that they need to fully disclose how their vehicle will be used.

“The action the insurance companies tend to take is that once we become aware that a vehicle is being used for commercial usage, we would pull the private policy from that client and either cease the policy altogether or reissue them with a commercial policy,” the insurance spokesman declared.

“If we get information from the public or anybody else about a vehicle being used for commercial usage, we would evaluate it to determine whether we could take the action against the person or not,” the insurance executive said.

Graham revealed that the industry was currently conducting investigations into complaints against private motorists who are reportedly using their vehicles for commercial purposes.

He was not in a position to say how many were being probed at this stage. emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb