Agreeing that passengers should be charged for stopping Public Service Vehicles (PSVs) in areas other than bus stops, Chief Magistrate Ian Weekes nevertheless warned drivers to stop this and other unruly behaviour on the nation’s streets.
He made the comments while chiding over 20 drivers of PSVs appearing before him in the District ‘A’ Traffic Court on Thursday on a myriad of charges, including being off route, picking up passengers other than at a bus stop, parking in restricted areas, cutting short their routes, not wearing seatbelts, and not displaying their badges.
“Let me send a message, this behaviour must come to a halt,” Weekes said after slapping the majority of the drivers with hundreds of dollars in forthwith fines.
“You see minibuses stopping at other than a bus stop, I am hitting you with the hammer with that because some of you are arrogant and have a sense of entitlement about here. Stop at the bus stops and stop holding up traffic and arguing with others about it.”
The chief magistrate told the group that Barbadians were becoming fed up with the behaviour many of them engaged in and using the excuse that they had to “hustle” to feed their children was not good enough.
“Nobody ain’t tell wunna to go and have four, six or eight children. Nobody cares. I do not care if you go and have this many children. It is not my job to help you all feed them. Nobody cares,” Weekes said. “Somebody said that the passengers should be charged for making wunna stop (other than at a bus stop) and I believe that that should happen too, but until that happens, if every time wunna going to entertain slackness by stopping all over the place, wunna will pay for it and wunna children will suffer because people are tired of this ignorance of the poor black man.
“Wunna need to pull wunna selves together. All sort of workers out there hustling and have mouths to feed too, so y’all have to stop with this rubbish. Stop making bad choices!” he insisted.
Magistrate Weekes told the PSV workers that they were making “a vital contribution to the transport system” and had people’s lives in their hands.
“Act like it!” the chief magistrate demanded of the drivers.
