With roads severely damaged and the Robertsfield Bridge impassable after Hurricane Melissa, residents of Halls Delight in rural St Andrew carved a temporary roadway through a gully to restore access to the community. The poor conditions have also pushed students to ride motorbikes to Mavis Bank High School, as families say it is cheaper and faster than hiring transport in areas where buses do not operate.

Bikes to the rescue 

With roads in shambles, students turn to motorbikes for school commute

Jamaica Gleaner/24 Nov 2025/Karen Madden/Gleaner Writer

IN THE best of times, the drive to Halls Delight in the hills of rural St Andrew is not for the faint of heart.

Now, three weeks after Hurricane Melissa dumped several inches of rain on the pictur- esque community, turning already poor roads into raging rivers, the journey has become even slower, bumpier, and more frightening. Large craters still pockmark the roadway.

For nearly two weeks after the storm, the Robertsfield Bridge was impassable, and a massive breakaway where the road collapsed into a gully also cut access to Halls Delight.

Residents eventually took matters into their own hands, carving out a temporary roadway through the gully to restore passage to the hillside town.

The worsening road conditions for cars and trucks have contributed to a new trend: students are now riding motorbikes to Mavis Bank High School.

When The Gleaner visited the area on Wednesday, several students were seen leaving school on their motorbikes and heading home. Among them was 17-year-old Kemoy Blake*, an 11th-grade student who rides daily from Halls Delight to the school on the Mount Charles main road.

“My mother bought me the bike, and my brother taught me to ride three years ago. It’s cheaper, and it’s fun and takes about 20 minutes to reach school,” he said.

Sharlene Davis, acting vice-principal at Mavis Bank High, told The Gleaner that she was aware that several students from Halls Delight in St Andrew, as well as Penlyne Castle and Hagley Gap in St Thomas, commuted by motorcycle.

CHEAPER ALTERNATIVE

“Some of them live very, very far – way up in the hills – and so it’s hard for them to reach here, and what some of the parents have done, they have bought them the bikes so that it would be much cheaper for them,” she said. “Just to buy gas is not a lot, compared to pay- ing someone else to bring them to school and to be here on time because they would have to wake up very early. Some places where they are coming from, buses don’t run up there, so [it is] in order not to be late and it’s cheaper for them.”

She added that even students from other schools use motorbikes to navigate the rugged terrain.

“Even other students who are not part of our school population, they ride, and you see them in the mornings coming from Penlyne Castle, and so on, because how else are they going to reach? It’s hard,” Davis said.

“Sometimes I wonder if I would be able to manage if I had a child up there because it is

$1,000 from Penlyne [Castle] to come here – $1,000 to come $1,000 to go, so it’s a lot of money.”

The deteriorating roads are also taking a toll on residents who must travel them daily.

Antoinette Dias, a clerk at Mavis Bank High who lives in the Mount Charles housing scheme near the Hagley Gap bridge that was washed away during the hurricane, lamented the high cost of vehicle maintenance and expressed worry about how the hurricane damage in the area will delay the return of electricity.

“I don’t know when we going to get back light because the road collapsed and the landslides took the light posts. We set some ice up here [at school], and I still have my Home Sweet Home lamp and my solar lamps, which I bring to school to charge,” Dias told The Gleaner.

She added that the situation has been made worse by years of neglect.

“Look here, the road situation is bad. The bridge collapsed and is the nearby farm owner who used his men and tractors to redirect the river and also used the tractor to bring people across while the river was still in spate. The road leading to the housing scheme is also really, really bad. It has not been fixed in years, and the hurricane just made a bad situation worse. I replace front-end parts on the car every month,” she lamented.

Melesia Afflick, who teaches at the school, told The Gleaner the road situation has impacted attendance at the school, which has 250 students on roll.

“About 80 per cent of the school population are back out. The other 20 per cent don’t have light and water or blocked in, probably because they can’t cross it (the river) based on where they are traversing from because most of our students come from either the St thomas end or the hills of St Andrew. So they are affected by the rising of the water and the damage to the bridges, so they can’t cross,” she said.

*Name changed to protect identity.

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