Garth Rattray | Standstill traffic causes standstill business

Nowadays, I find myself either quoting or referring to my father (of blessed memory). He was a visionary trapped in and limited by a flawed bureaucratic system ... a system that still exists today. From way back in the early 1980s, he used to say, “We have a peak hour now. Soon we will have a peak day!”

You would expect that the powers that be would give the [then] Kingston and St Andrew Corporation (KSAC) city engineer a listening ear, but they didn’t. When the time was ideal for the construction of wider roadways and laying out more efficient traffic corridors, they didn’t. Instead, being myopic, they whined about costs because they were being penny wise and pound foolish. And we are now suffering the consequences of their short-sightedness.

A good example of the seriousness of our traffic congestion despite the Government’s best effort is the Hagley Park Corridor. The road was upgraded and converted into a dual carriageway. An overpass was constructed at Three Miles to facilitate the free flow of traffic. By the time the project was completed in September 2019, perspicacious observers would have noticed a steady increase in the number of motor vehicles accessing the roadway. Now, some six years later, traffic jams and gridlock are common along the corridor.

Figures from three years ago indicate that during that year, the Island Traffic Authority certified 575,041 motor vehicles. That same year, Jamaica imported 50,786 motor vehicles. Since then, there has been steady increases in the importation of new and used motor vehicles. Therefore, the number of vehicles on our roads today is certainly significantly higher than it was a few years ago.

The impetus for penning this piece came about when I took a Sunday morning drive along Marcus Garvey Drive. As usual, I was struck by the number of imported motor vehicles parked and waiting to join our already congested roadways. The tide of recently imported vehicles never recedes. As soon as a wave of them leaves that in-bond location and is transported to the anxiously waiting auto dealers, another wave takes its place.

PONDERED

I pondered where they were headed, which auto dealer lots are expecting them, and what will happen when they are also stuck in our hourly traffic jams. They represent income for the government coffers, income for motor vehicle dealers, transport for some citizens, and are inexorably destined to spend endless hours standing still in serpentine lines of traffic, throttling away [precious and expensive] fossil fuel, polluting the air, frustrating road users, and inevitably bringing transport to a crawl, punctuated by countless halts.

Selling motor vehicles is a big and lucrative business. Citizens want the independence, the comfort, the convenience, and the [relative] safety of their own transportation. Additionally, owning a motor vehicle is an indication of aspiration towards success or an indication of success itself. In some instances, owning a vehicle, especially a certain type of vehicle, is a status symbol.

There was a spike in the acquisition and use of small motor cars and minibuses when two things occurred – the widespread laying off of government workers (who were left to fend for themselves (any went into the taxi and minibus business), and the capitulation of the state-run public transport system (which was buckling under the weight of Jamaica’s massive public transport patronage) to bring ‘robot’ (illegal) taxicabs under the umbrella of the public-transport system (which is regulated by the Transport Authority).

When it comes to [private and public] transport, Jamaica is caught up in a catch 22 situation. We import motor vehicles on demand then we upgrade the roads to meet the increased number of vehicles. The upgraded roads allow for the increased importation of motor vehicles, which demands more roadways, which leads to more vehicles and so on and so on.

Another consequence of having too many private cars [especially] on our urban roads, is that there is little space for public-transport vehicles. We have all seen unfortunate citizens standing at bus stops with frustration and pain etched on their faces, waiting for interminably long times, while buses are stuck in traffic for hours, and taxi cabs ignore all the traffic laws and make new lanes to get ahead of the standstill traffic.

PREPARE MENTALLY

It is bad enough that we must prepare ourselves mentally to face aggression, indiscipline, and crawling traffic whenever we venture onto city roads, but now, many of us must take time to assess the feasibility of going to various business places. We must ponder the necessity of the trip and weigh that against the torture that we and our motor vehicles must endure getting to whichever place we plan to visit.

Already, people are making choices that entail the avoidance of several business hubs. The turbulence, chaos, and creeping traffic are sometimes just not worth the trouble. The avoidance of city travel is already having a negative impact on several businesses. Eventually, traffic jams will bring businesses to their knees.

Our traffic situation is untenable. It is a pity that the myopic bureaucrats did not give that former KSAC city engineer the opportunity to spare us this burgeoning disaster. By now, we would have had a circumferential, elevated, multilane, bi-directional highway, accessible by radiating roadways that provide flow to and from the hub of the city. We would have used the lands juxtaposed to our large canals (so-called ‘gullies’) for transporting people to circumvent city congestion.

Traffic congestion is going to choke businesses to death.

Garth Rattray is a medical doctor with a family practice, and author of ‘The Long and Short of Thick and Thin’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and garthrattray@gmail.com.