Control needed

The head of one of the island’s public service vehicle (PSV) organisations wants an independent body established to monitor and have greater overall control of the privately-run transportation sector.

Chairman of the Alliance Owners of Public Transport (AOPT) Roy Raphael made the call as he said order needed to be restored to the sector urgently, with some workers not adhering to rules and regulations.

He told Barbados TODAY that based on information gathered by his organisation, 51 per cent of conductors were not registered as required under the Road Traffic Act and there were 25 pirate PSVs “just running all about”.

Additionally, Raphael complained, the vast majority of PSV operators – 80 per cent – were not wearing uniforms on the job in breach of the dress code that came into effect on January 2, 2019, under the Road Traffic (Amendment) Regulations.

“So [the sector] must be controlled and the operations must be done by someone who knows about public transport and its operations,” Raphael told Barbados TODAY, adding that other problems, such as overserviced routes, continued to fester and compound the lack of order.

“It appears to me that the matter of public transport needs a feasibility study to see where the transport sector was in 1981, some 40 years ago, as it relates to now. Some routes like Speightstown have over 150 buses which cause those buses to drag [drive extremely slowly]. If you have everybody running up there [Speightstown] you are going to have problems,” the AOPT head said.

“You have issues with the fact that some people start work at 5 a.m. and after 6 o’clock in the evening you can’t find buses on certain routes. So it must be controlled.”

Raphael added that his association fully endorsed the proposed privatisation of the state-owned Transport Board and the establishment of a Barbados Mass Transit Authority to bring the entities that govern public transport under one umbrella. This, he suggested, would not only benefit the PSV sector financially but help restore order.

“Having the transportation privatised would give us a greater share of the pie because . . . it would look at modernisation of the Transport Board in terms of route rationalisation. You wouldn’t have all the buses running at one time and finishing at a certain time. You wouldn’t have a situation where some routes don’t have any buses on them, like Rendezvous Gardens, The Ivy, Forde’s Road. Those don’t carry Transport Board buses,” he contended.

Raphael said his association would soon be writing to the Ministry of Transport to start “serious” consultations on the privatisation and the Mass Transit Authority initiatives.

emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb