BARBADOS’ INLAND TRANSPORT system requires an energetic, innovative and deeply thought out programme of renewal if it is not to retard the economic and sustainable development of our island.
Six weeks ago, Minister of Transport and Works Michael Lashley told the Inland Transport Committee Panel of the United Nations Economic Commission in Geneva that his ministry was reviewing and refining strategic plans in the areas of road safety, transport services, and national infrastructure. We wish the minister well, and hope he achieves his objectives.
There has always been a great deal of political posturing on transport policy, and while the talking goes on a host of environmental, social and economic and other initiatives are suffering from the adverse fallout which attends the mishmash that is our inland transportation system.
The fallout is particularly felt in the mass movement of people from home to work and other places and back home. It has become unwise to plan on using public transport for anything which falls outside the ordinary hours of work. Unless the average citizen owns a motor vehicle or, to use a colourful Bajanism, is able to “bum” a lift back home, he is asking for trouble.
In fact, getting to work for many who do not own a car is a major daily challenge, which contributes in no small way to loss of productivity when one emerges from the torrid atmosphere of some, mercifully not all, of the privately owned public service vehicles which jet about our streets.
Common sense alone shows that this sugar plantation island jewel requires a modern arrangement and pattern of roads to cope with the new economic and social changes which mark us out as a modern small economy bordering on First World status. Without such a system, it is not putting it too high to say that our economic and other plans may grind to an inefficient stall.
Consider two developments in the last 60 years. Without the ABC Highway, travelling from one end of this island to the other would be a motorists’ nightmare with gridlock of Himalayan proportions. Its absence would have retarded West Coast tourism development, which is critically important to us. And the far-sighted development of the Deep Water Harbour in the mid-’50s and the rapid build-out of the Grantley Adams International Airport shows how important transportation can be to an economy.
These examples relate mainly to international transport into our island, where benefits can be easily observed, and they also underline the point that transport is of high economic import. It must be clear that the mass transportation of people to and from work is also a matter of the highest economic importance, the more so when the pattern of roads designed for a plantation economy has not been reorganised to take account of the changed situation.
A total study of our inland transport systems and infrastructure is long overdue. But the politicking must stop. Some of the politicking which attended the proposed building of flyovers continues to this day, while gridlock is the order of the road at many of our roundabouts.
The frequent and necessary use of the ABC Highway tells us two related stories: firstly, that it was necessary and came not a moment too soon; and secondly, that we need similar road development in other parts of this island. We cannot fully develop this country while relying on roads built for slow-moving donkey carts.
