It’s not something that strikes you if you live in Guyana and don’t travel much, but if you are based outside for some time and then 
return here permanently, you immediately notice the obvious shortage of systematic approaches, in both government and private sector, many of which impact directly across the society on a daily basis. Against that background, as we contemplate this or that tempestuous subject before us we recognize immediately that the problem, to a significant degree, is often one of our own doing. A prime example is the current variegated turmoil as City Hall unveils its controversial parking meter plan for Georgetown.
In most countries, it is a fundamental planning requirement that companies constructing buildings in cities are required to provide parking for persons using the building based on a percentage of parking spaces per square foot of the structure. Guyana’s bubbling parking meter melee tells us immediately that such a stipulation was never part of the process here. Over the years, companies or individuals were given approval to erect buildings in the city (many of them multi-storey) even though the applicant did not provide a single parking space; that addendum didn’t exist. With one exception, supermarkets in town with hundreds of shoppers generally did not provide even one parking space for customers. In retrospect, our earlier governments are to blame for this lapse which has left Georgetown woefully short of parking.
Even in the tiny Cayman Islands (population 55,000) where I lived for 25 years, a planning application to build was not even considered without parking facilities being provided. When I first went there, 30 years ago, that was the case. At that very time, no builder here faced those obligations, and in the ensuing years, as the city grew and the number of vehicles rose dramatically, none were introduced. The resulting congestion that City Hall is now attempting to confront is therefore a problem of our own doing. We created this chaos with our own blindness, and while I haven’t researched the matter it could well be that even today, for a new building going up, the requirement to provide parking, per square foot of floor space, is probably still absent. And so to be fair to the parking meter company, the public clamour confronting them belongs in the ‘chickens coming home to roost’ category.
For the public, historically accustomed to unregulated parking across Guyana, this is a significant shift and considerable thought should have been given to that aspect. Our usually not common ‘common sense’ should have told City Hall that there was a dramatic disruption in the making here. Ingrained behaviours, taken for granted over many decades, would now be transformed, virtually overnight, and extensive public relations outreaches and citizens’ feedback should have been solicited. There should have been television infomercials, radio spots, billboard displays, and public community meetings, designed to (a) educate citizens about the change and (b) to garner their input on prices, implementation schedules, parking exemptions, etc. For such a significant shift in a long entrenched public habit, there should have been town hall meetings where contentious views could have been ventilated. In fact, it might have been a good idea to use a writer with some imagination to produce a song on the issue to massage public opinion to the cause; to, as the advertising boys say, “soften the issue”.
The ‘pay to park’ controversy is not the only one of our making; City Hall is not guilty alone. As Freddie Kissoon and other writers remind us daily, Guyana abounds in examples of our lack of systematic or sequential approaches to matters large or small. The dangerous driving habits one sees every day on our roadways, for instance, are largely a result of haphazard controls over the years – a lack of police cruisers patrolling our major arteries; absence of officers at traffic lights – and while the shortage of funding for such exercises has to be acknowledged, the other acknowledgement is that it is a critical matter. Another example is the poor adherence to the tendering process for government projects which has also been with us for decades, as is the shortage of youth development programmes. In a recent column, Alan Fenty provided another example in the lack of systematic training that is producing incompetencies at various regional bodies dealing with cultural activities – once again, something of our own doing.
However, as they say in Jamaica, “wi ah fe out de ‘ottest fyah fus”, and the parking meter controversy, perhaps because it impacts our daily lives virtually overnight, has stirred more push back from the public than anything in recent memory. Therein, perhaps, is a critical lesson for persons leading other similar public projects – examine your subject carefully to avoid running up against barriers of our own making. Some of them go back for decades, and they can be formidable.
