‘Pirate’ vans spark insurance warnings

Insurers on Friday advised commuters not to use ‘pirate’ public service vehicles (PSVs), while licensed operators have warned of an all-out war between registered and unregistered vehicles.

The insurance companies are adamant that commuters who are injured or suffer loss in an accident while riding pirate vehicles will not be compensated.

President of the General Insurance Association of Barbados (GIAB) Randy Graham insisted that this “dangerous” practice must stop now.

“Your private insurance policy does not cover you if you are taking fee-paying passengers. So, if you cause an accident with the vehicle when you are effectively doing piracy, your insurance does not cover the accident. So that the people that are in the vehicle, and the damage that you cause now, run the risk of the insurance companies denying it,” Graham told Barbados TODAY.

“You have to go after the driver to get the claim paid, which we all know is a nightmare trying to recover from private individuals.”

Graham added: “We strongly encourage people to stop it….

The persons who get in the vans are at risk, and any damage that they cause on the road, it is going to be at risk. So, it’s a practice that needs to be discouraged and stopped.”

He said the insurers do not want to see any situation where a commuter is injured and the victim is left out in the cold.

“I don’t want to see anybody in a van get injured and then theman doesn’t have insurance for them, and then everybody is in trouble,” the insurance industry spokesman argued.

Chairman of the Alliance Owners of Public Transport (AOPT), Roy Raphael on Friday vented his frustration at the ongoing piracy issue, warning that it is teetering on the verge of a street battle.

“Let me assure you, that if this continues, it is going to create war between the pirates and the legal operators…because those guys say they are not going to continue to pay a lot of money while these people just coming out there with a haphazard arrangement and picking up everybody in front of them and go ahead. It is not going to continue,” Raphael declared.

He said the government needs to step in and resolve this matter as quickly as possible.

Raphael is also calling on the Transport Authority to meet at the negotiation table to settle this and other outstanding issues affecting the PSV industry.

“The government needs to deal with these pirates head-on.

You cannot have persons putting their lives at risk. In one way you are saying the PSVs put persons’ lives at risk by driving recklessly, but yet you have persons running up and down with ‘C’ plates, private plates, without being regulated. It cannot continue to happen. It needs to stop,” the PSV association chairman contended.

On Wednesday, the chairman of the Association of Public Transport Operators, Anwar Nana, complained that the authorities seemed not to be doing anything about the pirates.

He cautioned that the situation was spiralling out of controland, like Raphael, warned of the potential for retaliation from frustrated PSV operators, “because it’s their livelihood you are affecting”.

But the Transport Authority director Ruth Holder countered that while it has “evidence” of pirate operations, it may not be sufficient for prosecution.

emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb