Our urban roads these days are not much better than those in rural Barbados. Wherever we journey now broken road surfaces confront us. Additionally, the major water mains replacement programme of the Barbados Water Authority, while no doubt contributing to less leakage of the precious commodity and a more reliable service to the consumer, has left many streets in a horrid state.
What we therefore have in Barbados today is a road network that has deteriorated from age, heavy use, the presence of vehicles of greater weight than many of the roads were designed to accommodate, excavation for service with at times questionable reinstatement quality standards, all compounded by the seasonal headaches caused by the onset of frequent and at times heavy rainfall.
And those who manage the roads appear not up to the task. We drive over roads for months and see gradual deterioration escalating week by week with no sign of intervention by the Ministry of Transport, until the surface is so bad it becomes a national embarrassment. The section of Highway 3 through Waterford Bottom is a perfect example of this. The dips and drops in the surface went from subtle to pronounced over many months, with no response from authorities until it became so bad that the critical artery has been closed for repairs now for two weeks.
But then again we should not be surprised since the major road rebuilding project through Hindsbury Road to Station Hill some years ago was supposed to continue all the way to Hothersal Turning, but for some reason it never got beyond the area of Combermere School.
We see potholes on other major arteries like the ABC and Ronald Mapp Highways that remain a nuisance for weeks before they are patched, and along the tourist belt – Highway 1 and Highway 7 – literally running the length of the island the surface during rainfall is an absolute hazard to any pedestrian.
There is no need to mention the state of roads in the Scotland District because we are sure those who are in charge would themselves admit their state is nothing short of a national embarrassment. This is not the network Barbadians once boasted about when making comparisons with every other Caribbean country.
What makes this situation so much more untenable, though, is the fact that we have had a long post-Independence tradition of consistently engaging in major road building and upgrading – until now. We cannot look around the country and point to any major highway projects taking place. We have talked for the past two to three years of multimillion-dollar foreign-funded road projects that were coming, but we are yet to see them materialise.
It is almost as if the dreaded recession that has been blamed for just about every area of inactivity in our national affairs for almost a decade has also robbed us of our creativity and spirit of enterprise. We allowed politics to curtail a sensible design for the relief of traffic congestion on the ABC Highway with no reasonable alternative – so after spending tens of millions, traffic still crawls during rush hour.
The Ronald Mapp Highway has long been overwhelmed as a single-lane roadway but we have heard of no plan to expand it and each day northern residents face a traffic jam that can stretch from Warrens in St Michael to Westmoreland in St James.
In the face of all this, Government has articulated no plan to tackle the vexing problem of a lack of sidewalks on most of our roads, resulting in a situation where pedestrians today compete with motorists for space with more than 120 000 vehicles on the road, just as they did in the 1970s when it was just a fraction of that number.