Dear Editor,
Guyana is not the only major Caribbean territory with a prioritised public transportation network. It however operates the only public transportation in the Caribbean without a system. Guyana’s public transportation operations do not include a single identifiable facility for passengers to sit and wait to be picked up. That is probably because neither the operators nor their clients know where they will stop next. For example mini-buses even stop when the traffic lights are on ‘green’ to go. The remainder of the traffic has had to come to terms with this arrogated privilege of mini-brained transporters.
There is no explicit policy in Guyana which seeks to certify that public transporters are officially trained in the rules of the traffic before being licensed to drive. Local insurance companies should insist on this as a prerequisite.
In this vaunted tourist oriented country there are no visible standards of wear (uniforms) for drivers and conductors, nor of the hygiene conditions of the vehicles. Guyana’s counterparts in the more authentic tourism territories do not tolerate noise pollution in their vehicles, including inordinate horn-blowing. The fact that they choose to observe the traffic regulations makes unnecessary the excessive recourse to horn-stomping.
Copies of the local traffic regulations are not easily accessible. A summary booklet of the critical features will help the Traffic Department no less than the commuters and operators.
One feature of that original legislation identified ‘articulated’ vehicles, eg, trucks and lorries – that is before the era of the current super-weight vehicles. It stipulated the maximum number of hours drivers should be on long hauls and included a mandatory rest period. Has anybody mentioned recently tiredness as a factor contributing to accidents? What technologies exist for analysing conditions immediately prior to, and not only after, an incident or accident?
Logically the regulations would distinguish between speed limits for smaller private vehicles and for larger commercial vehicles. So that, for example, the driver of the former category does not have to compete, as currently obtains, with a twelve-ton sugar transport truck on the East Coast highway.
Hopefully, the updated regulations refer to such signage as: ‘Caution’; ‘Give way to the vehicle on your right’; ‘Do not overtake on the left’; ‘Slow’; ‘Dangerous curve.’ Prizes should be awarded to the first who can find these signs erected, in addition of course to the applicable speed limits. ‘No Entry’ signs are noticeably invisible.
If not already installed, the GRA, the Insurance Association and the NIS should share a database of owners, drivers and conductors of public transport.
The above is only part of a package of improvements that can be bloodlessly instituted in the overall management of our road transport system.
Yours faithfully,
E. B. John
