Dear Editor,
I refer to a letter in yesterday’s Sunday Stabroek (April 21) captioned ‘The Demerara Bridge cannot be built in reinforced concrete and would not be profitable for any developer.’ My friend Malcolm (Alli) who penned this letter has it all wrong. During a recent engineering conference, the General Manager of the Demerara Harbour Bridge presented the chart below indicating the annual number of vehicles crossing the bridge from east to west for the period Jan 9 to Dec 12
Malcolm’s assumption that 2000 cars cross the bridge daily in one direction is far too low. As shown in the chart the number is 160,000/month or roughly 5,300/day if taxis are counted as cars. Furthermore, 270,000 vehicles/month or 9,000/day contribute to the revenue stream. He should have used at least 9000 in his analysis.
I will leave it to a structural engineer to comment on the possibility of spanning the river with a concrete structure and a transport economist to comment on Malcolm’s financial analysis. My gut feeling however is he is as far off the mark on both of these points as he was on vehicle numbers.
Yours faithfully,
Edward Gonsalves
