One of the key aspects of any modern country is the necessity to have in place a properly managed and operated mass transport system.Such a system is important if only because citizens need to move easily and punctually about their business and pleasure. We commonly refer to our island as having a first world profile, but as the Minister with responsibility for Transport Mr John Boyce remarked recently, more needs to be done to improve all aspects of our transport system.The minister was speaking at the DLP weekly luncheon and lecture where he spoke about the need to retrain the Transport Board staff. He told his audience that the staff needed to be constantly reminded and retrained to meet customer needs and the needs of the travelling public.In fact, the minister said that complaints were reaching his ears of the unsatisfactory practices of some Transport Board drivers.We think the minister is on the right track, because for far too long, many Barbadians, including some workers at the Board itself, have not recognised that the Transport Board renders a major public service. Some call it a social service, but suffice it to say that it is a service, and its customers are the public who travel daily on its buses. But service to the public does not rest solely with the drivers and conductors who interface with the public, although they are extremely important. Service of the highest class must begin with those people who have a responsibility to manage the entity. A sufficient number of buses must be made available and a facility for the proper maintenance and repair of the buses so as to keep an adequate fleet in service is necessary.One of the features of transport service is reliability of service, and complaints about the large number of private cars on the island will not by itself lead to any decrease in the number of such cars since the unreliability of the public transport service will force workers to acquire their own transport. So that efficient timetabling of the service and adequate supervision and regulation of transport workers is vital. A bus that is scheduled to leave the terminal at 10 o’clock, for example, must therefore leave at that time every morning so that potential passengers can “bet their bottom dollar” that the service will be on time. In this way, the Transport Board is the more likely to recapture market share and the public aspects of the transport service may yet acquire the patina of world class service.The current minister seems bent on pulling the system into shape and although his task is the more complicated by the private transport operations which complicate the planning and delivery of the public service, we urge him to make sure that the Government’s policy on transport takes all the operators into account, and that such adjustments will be made to passenger routes to ensure an islandwide service of the highest quality.
