Mark Cummins, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Transport, Works and Maintenance.
The Ministry of Transport, Works and Maintenance is aware of the transport issues the public faces and as such are working hard to alleviate them.
Speaking during the National Consultation on Traffic Management that recently took place, Mark Cummins, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Transport, Works and Maintenance stated that Wednesday night’s forum was held to address these issues and discuss some initiatives that could be put in place to ease traffic problems.
“Barbados in spite of its small size has a large volume of vehicles, in excess of 110 000 which traverses our road network of 109 000 kilometres, all of this takes place within a space of 430 square kilometres and this dense network lends itself to traffic congestion,” he said.
“We at the Ministry need to actively shape Barbados’ future as it relates to mobility and accessibility. We do have challenges with the management of our traffic and we expect that forum to provide us with some ideas which could be fleshed out into policy which could alleviate some of the congestion that we currently experience in Barbados.”
The Minister of Transport, Works and Maintenance, William Duguid, highlighted that bus availability seemed to be the root of the problem, however, they were working assiduously with the Transport Authority and the Transport Board help fix this.
Jason Bowen, Senior Technical Officer highlighted that essentially there was significant congestion along the roads and highways in Bridgetown and around the Bridgetown area, and parking seemed to be a major cause.
He explained that persons tried to beat traffic but essentially ended up creating more traffic upstream. Additionally, he noted that they were seeing problems with respect to parking.
“There is a lot of parking in restricted areas and double parking in Bridgetown because people actually park on the streets for significant periods of time. People even park in the loading zones,” he said.
He reported that during their investigations, they found that in the instance that a loading could not access the area for offloading, they double parked – which caused more traffic!
Bowen believed that there was a general view of inadequacy in respect to parking by many motorists in Bridgetown.
“There is an attitude of people parking wherever they feel like and there is no fear of any kind, of the penalties,” he said. (CLF)