Dear Editor,
On Monday January 6, 2025, schools reopened their doors, and as is typical of the first day of school, Guyanese drivers everywhere braced themselves to sit in more traffic. The dread of “school traffic” is a symptom of how poor the government’s approach to transportation is.
In study after study the world over, starting in 1930, research has proven that widening roads does not solve traffic. Instead, while traffic volumes might reduce in the short term, invariably, traffic eventually worsens due to the addition of more lanes. This is due to the phenomenon of induced demand. Persons who previously would’ve chosen an alternative to driving see the expanded roads as incentive to drive, and so abandon their previous travel plans in favour of driving, which adds more vehicles to the road. Induced demand also occurs when new roads are built. The result is the newer, bigger, wider roads themselves being generators of the very traffic they were built to solve. In fact, the relationship between expansion and congestion is 1:1. When road capacity doubles, so does the number of people who use the road.
When the Heroes’ Highway was opened, East Bank commuters breathed a huge sigh of relief, thinking their traffic woes were at an end. Instead of a solution, they found only a temporary reprieve, and traffic on the East Bank now is still as problematic as ever. The new Crane to Schoonord Highway promised to eliminate traffic on the west side, and yet, a trip over the bridge on any weekday morning or evening shows that traffic is still very much present. East Coast commuters are probably waiting with bated breath for the completion of the Railway Embankment Expansion Project. They will be blue in the face waiting for a reduction in traffic.
It is not only with investing in things that have proven to be ineffective solutions to traffic that the government displays inconsistencies and counterproductivity in transportation sector decisions.
Stabroek News published an article on January 5, 2025, titled “Differently-abled persons to have their own buses – Edghill”. In that article, the Hon. Minister of Public Works is quoted as saying “We believe public transportation should primarily belong to the private sector”. Editor, I do not have to point out the irony obvious in the very opposite words private and public. I will point out instead, that the responsibility to ensure there is adequate transportation for the public is far too great to be placed in the hands of the private sector. In all the years since government vested the responsibility with the private sector, the public transportation system in Guyana has not moved beyond minibuses that have proven to be a hazard to life on our roadways, surpassed only by trucks. It should not be the position of a government that is interested in progress and development that someone else needs to carry the responsibility of providing a service as fundamental as public transportation. Had even a fraction of the money invested in road expansion been invested instead in public transit, Guyana’s transportation landscape would be significantly more advanced than it currently is, providing access to many more Guyanese.
In a Harvard study, it was found that access to transportation – not education, not ethnicity, not gender, not skill/talent/ability, not $100,000 cash grants – was the single most important factor in determining an individual’s ability to escape poverty. Access to transportation cannot mean that every Guyanese is expected to buy a car, which the private sector would love. While VP Jagdeo has expressed that Guyanese have a proclivity for car ownership and so the government is not in a rush to invest significantly in public transportation projects, he should perhaps consider that the preference for private car ownership is the result of the alternative being dangerous minibuses.
Easy lesson good for dunce. The government must confront the reality that its efforts and investments in widening roads have failed to solve traffic. The government must confront the reality that the private sector has failed to provide a viable public transportation system. If the PPP/C government is serious about such things as solving congestion, improving the quality of life of Guyanese, or lifting people in the nation out of poverty, the posture towards transportation, and particularly public transportation, must change.
Sincerely,
Curtly A. Frank.
