PM Holness makes yet another Hopewell bypass promise to Hanoverians

WESTERN BUREAU:

With daily traffic congestion still stifling traffic flow through the town of Hopewell, in Hanover, Prime Minister, Dr Andrew Holness, is again promising a bypass road to fix the perennial problem.

Speaking at a Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) workers appreciation function at the Bethel Primary School, in Hopewell, last weekend, Holness, in a wide-ranging presentation, said a bypass around Hopewell will be created, albeit not providing any timeline.

“We are going to build a bypass around Hopewell. We have looked at the alignment, and we are satisfied with the alignment, but not only are we going to build a bypass, the existing road we are going to do some work on it, to widen it and give it a slight realignment. And we are going to put a small urban centre in Hopewell,” Holness said.

Holness also made it clear that plans are also in the works to ensure Hopewell remains a flourishing township, noting population in and around Hopewell as “pretty decent,” in terms of its size, hence the government plans to invest, “to make it a decent town.”

“Right now, it (Hopewell) is just a one-street town, but we are going to fix it up, because we want our people to have proper urban spaces,” said Holness.

In March 2024, while on a tour of Hanover, and after having gotten a firsthand experience of the traffic congestion while travelling through Hopewell, he described Hopewell as a “bottleneck town.”

“We will have to make a bypass road for Hopewell,” he said then. “We are currently surveying areas to see where the best place is to put it.” In his 2024/25 Budget presentation a month later, Holness explained that tourism stakeholders in western Jamaica have expressed the need for bypass roads for both Hopewell and the parish capital, Lucea, as both were key to the preservation of Negril as a tourism resort.

According to Holness, the configuration of the roadway being considered was a four-lane highway, that starts at an intersection along the under-construction Long Hill bypass, in St James, and ends at a point beyond Lucea.

“The alignment will then traverse westward for approximately 30 kilometres, with link roads to the main road before and after the town of Hopewell, before terminating on the westward side of Lucea,” he said at the time.

After that 2024 budget presentation, there were no further announcements until the argument was resurrected by Holness last weekend.

Motorists travelling from Montego Bay to Lucea and Negril must tack on at least 30 minutes to traverse Hopewell, where a combination of narrow roads in some areas, and indisciplined motorists in others, have mad the travelling experience both time-consuming and challenging.

“That is one part of my daily commute to work that I do enjoy,” a police officer, who travels from Montego Bay to Lucea daily, told The Gleaner. “On a normal day, it could take you half and hour to clear the town. However, whenever it rains, you will have to tack on a least another half and hour.”