General Manager of the Transport Board Fabian Wharton, has revealed that road and bridge repairs in a number of rural areas has led to major disruptions in bus service on St Lucy routes.
During Monday’s Parish Speaks session held at the Daryll Jordan Secondary School in Trents, St Lucy Wharton said that along with the limited resources available to the Transport Board to service a number of routes, repairs to the Bawden’s and Thompson bridges in St Andrew have caused the board to make a number of changes to bus times.
“We have a situation at the Transport Board where the northern parts – St Lucy, St Andrew and those rural districts which are only serviced by the Transport Board primarily, we have a limited amount of resources. At this moment we are looking at seeing how we can address it.”
He added: “Because we had to use additional resources as a result of what is happening to the bridges in St Andrew, we are now deploying way more buses into that St Andrew corridor than we would have normally deployed. We are at the stage where there is going to be some relief hopefully soon, as it relates to that routing. There is some work that is being done where that road is going to be soon addressed. We are then going to move back those resources to allocate for the St Lucy Church bus,” he explained.
Member of Parliament for St Andrew Dr Romel Springer, confirmed that the repairs to the Bawden’s Bridge and the Thompson Bridge were still on-going, but promised that the temporary bridge at Bawden’s which needed emergency repairs last year, would soon be opened to regular traffic after structural tests are completed.
“Working with our technical staff, we have determined we can reopen the Bawden’s Bridge to all traffic including public service vehicles. That should give some ease to the Transport Board, because they would have had to put in a number of buses in there to service routes that were disrupted because of the closure of the bridge.
“We are working to have that bridge reopened as early as next week.”
During the Parish Speaks session, Prime Minister Mia Mottley took some Public Service Vehicles (PSVs) to task for a lack of service to rural areas because they are not as “profitable” as others.
“The last government increased the number of privately owned licences from just under 400, to now over 750 people,” she said. “The last government effectively privatised transport in this country, but there was one problem, they privatised it without proper regulation. It meant that all the private people got the short routes that are profitable, and who got the long routes that don’t make no money, government.” (SB)
