Editorial | Roads and little things

The Government’s announced programme to properly identify and standardise the names of all of Jamaica’s roads is a good initiative that is probably part of the administration’s push for a single national identification system, or NIDS.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness frequently complains about the informality of Jamaican society, and the difficulty, often, of tying people to specific addresses. Regularly, too, communities take on names far removed from their formal ones.

While The Gleaner welcomes this project, we suggest to the prime minister that he extends it with two related initiatives that ought to be relatively inexpensive to institute and maintain.

First, the identification of roads and standardisation of their names and spelling mustn’t only be on maps. It must be available and visible where they are useful to most people – in communities, on the physical roads. And there must be a sense of permanence about how, and where, the name plates or signs are placed.

Second, while we accept that Jamaica’s current economic circumstance doesn’t allow for the repair of the island’s badly deteriorated roads anywhere to the extent necessary, the Government can do small things, which, while not exactly compensatory, will make residents feel better about their communities.

It can, for example, ensure that drains are cleaned, verges are trimmed and garbage systematically collected.

And especially on major thoroughfares, traffic markings should be regularly painted and otherwise refreshed.

The cost of these should be mostly minimum wage labour and the price of the paint and cutting implements, without being bloated with procurement steroids.

Jamaica, the Government says, has 27,000 kilometres of roads. Most of these have names.

TWO PROBLEMS

Two problems usually arise. One is disputes over the designation of the roads, which determines in whose jurisdiction they fall: the central government’s National Works Agency (NWA); one of the municipal authorities; or the Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA), if it’s a farm road.

“Sometimes this road needs to be fixed, and when you go to the MP (member of parliament), the MP says, ‘No, this is a parish council road’,” Dr Holness said at a ceremony to mark the completion of a gully repair project in Old Harbour, St Catherine.

He added: “... When you go to the parish council, they say ‘No, this is an NWA road’. And then sometimes you go to the parish council and say, ‘This road needs to be fixed’, and the parish council says, ‘No, that’s a farm road’.”

The documentation, when completed, the prime minister said, will remove the ambiguities and overlaps, which should make planning easier.

“We’re going to …. ensure that all the roads are properly named, because if you look on one map, one road is spelt one way [and] you go to another map, it’s spelt another way. And that all the addresses are properly unified,” the prime minister.

The more pressing problem for Jamaicans and other people who use the island’s roads isn’t what appears on maps. It is more likely to be the absence of physical road names altogether, especially in rural environments.

Often in urban areas, there are badly angled poles with faded road names that few can read. More frequently, the poles stand like headless sentries to places whose names are to be guessed at.

BETTER SENSE

It would make better sense if these name plates were bolted to nearby walls or buildings, where they would be less susceptible to vandals and/or errant motor vehicles.

The prime minister reported that more than half of the road network needs serious repair. Despite the administration’s recent rehabilitation projects, it will be many years before the Government really gets on top of what is to be done.

Communities, though, would be more understanding and forgiving of these difficulties if they felt that there was an organised and structured approach in the way things are done. Small potholes shouldn’t have to become craters before there is any attempt to attend to them.

And people wonder why a trench dug by the water and sewage people has to remain open for weeks before there is any semblance of repair. Meanwhile, the road deteriorates further.

Or, they question why an accident barrier steel cable on, say, the Palisadoes road to the Norman Manley airport remains busted, limp and rusty years after it was run into.

They question, too, is why, when the fix isn’t expensive, traffic lanes and sidewalks having faded, stay unpainted, to add to Jamaica’s crisis of traffic crashes.

Their cynical answer usually is that it is indeed expensive. Not because of real costs, but because of the steroids to feed the beast.