In light of recent comments regarding raising bus fare, Senator Jepter Ince, Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, has revealed that the government will continue to fight and find ways to subsidise the fares paid to Transport Board.
His comment came during a lecture he gave at the Democratic Labour Party Headquarters on Friday. The lecture was meant to discuss where the monies paid in taxes went.
“Bus fare is now two dollars; let us think and think critically, do you believe that two dollars a day can move people around Barbados when in North America it is about US$3.50 from to station to station? When you think about it, the two dollar charge cannot carry Barbadians around Barbados,” he said.
Ince revealed that based on studies regarding bus fare, patrons should pay at least $5.50 per trip. He expressed that not every Barbadian in the island could afford to buy a car and noted that as the government, they must provide an avenue of transport for those persons. He noted that it would be inhumane to ask these persons to pay this obscene amount and said that it was their job as the government to subsidise the cost of transportation in order to help with the efficiency of the system.
He went on to say that “when people say that we should focus on cutting expenditure rather than raising revenue, they are asking for people to be laid off from state entities, they are asking for the level of service to be reduced, and they are asking for you to pay for these services directly from your pockets.”
As a result, the Senator assured that the government was fighting to keep persons employed as well as fighting to keep and even improve the level of service for the general public as well as fight to keep the current arrangements so that persons did not have to pay directly out of their pockets.