Thorne calls for priority to PSV passengers

Opposition Leader Ralph Thorne is not prepared to give flowers to the Ministry of Transport and Works (MTW) for fixing roads, when it is the job of MTW to maintain the island’s roads and bridges.

Thorne was speaking on Monday in the House of Assembly as the 2025-2026 Estimates of Income and Expenditure debate continued for a second week. During the session, attention was focused on MTW, which is led by Deputy Prime Minister Santia Bradshaw.

“We want good roads. We have not had good roads. I am not going to join the members of the government in congratulating the ministry for its recent attention to roads.

“When you fix roads, you don’t expect applause. When you fix roads, you’ve done your job,” he told the Lower Chamber.

In the coming year’s appropriation, some of $128.92 million has been budgeted for the ministry, which represents a $6 million reduction from the 2024-2025 figure to the ministry.

Describing as “curiosity that there is this recent upsurge in attention to roads in the second half of this cycle”, Thorne told the House that the Ministry of Transport and Works was the most visible of all the government ministries and the condition of the island’s roads was a marker of how the ministry was performing.

“I am also saying that this ministry tends to be judged by the state of roads, and it is called the Ministry of Transport and Works. It tends to be judged by the state of the transport system,” he told the chamber.

In his contribution, the Christ Church South MP called for the results of the country’s transport plan to be shared with the public, as he said a priority bus lane to assist public service vehicle passengers to get to work on time could be considered, as is the case in some parts of Trinidad and Tobago.

“As a vehicle owner and a driver on the streets, I always urge myself and my fellow vehicle owners to focus less on the driver of the public transport vehicle and focus more on the passengers, because they’re the important ones within those vehicles.

However badly that driver is behaving, those of us who like to think that we are conscientious will stop and allow them passage, not because we are accommodating indiscipline, but because we are sympathetic towards the passengers; those people who, I don’t wish to say cannot do any better, but those people who prefer for one reason or another to ride in those public transport vehicles,” Thorne told the House.

Conceding that the island may not have that space for a priority lane “but sometimes as sympathetic drivers, we will create that priority bus route and give way and concede to the drivers of these public service vehicles. . . . Sometimes we should create some concession, some priority out of sympathy for the passengers for whom getting to work at a particular point in time is more critical than for most other persons”.

The Christ Church South MP added: “They’re the vulnerable population within the larger population, and unless government has some plan, some transport plan, we may have to give some priority within public transport to those passengers, not drivers, to those passengers who need to get to work early.”

(IMC1)