Editorial | Urgent transport Green Paper

Given the capital’s perennial weekday traffic gridlock, and the increasing frequency of the phenomenon across Jamaica, Transport Minister Daryl Vaz’s promise of a revised national transportation policy is a matter of urgency.  It is also important to the country’s broader economic development.

Many people might argue that what is required is not a revised or updated version of anything, but just a plan. Which does not mean that credible concepts were drawn up for Jamaica’s transportation sector. Rather, there hasn’t, in recent decades, been a structured and coordinated national policy for how Jamaicans commute in relation to where they live, work, conduct business, play or recreate.

The result is a frustratingly higgledy-piggledy system that saps production and productivity while commuters annually waste scores of millions of man hours in traffic, or have their lives placed at risk by cavalier drivers who ignore road traffic norms. Indeed, what passes as public transportation in Jamaica, and its relationship with the rest of the economy, is an ingredient for national poverty.

For decades, and especially since the final collapse in the 1980s of the government-run Jamaica Omnibus Service (JOS), Jamaicans (particularly those in the Kingston Metropolitan Area (KMA) where approximately of the population lives, and is Jamaica’s critical business and commercial region) have bemoaned the state of public transport.  

JOS’ successor was ostensibly a franchise system whose many iterations essentially entrenched a free-for-all hodge-podge of private operators of single vehicles that transported passengers in hell-for-leather fashion, without due care for commuter safety, national laws or public decency.  Riding the city’s buses might have been the 20th century’s equivalent, in the diminution of self-esteem, of the Middle Passage experience.

By the late 1990s, it was clear that what existed was untenable for a modern economy and citizens’ sense of wellbeing.  This led to the creation of a new state-owned entity, the Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC), which, over three decades, taxpayers have kept afloat with hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and other support, without - but for its early years - the hoped-for transformation of public transport.  Affected by poor management and corruption, the JUTC, each year, loses huge sums of money. Its under-performance opened the door for licences to upwards of 30,000 route taxis to operate in the KMA to fill the slack. Frequency apart, their behaviour with respect to adherence to rules is largely reminiscent of the system the JUTC was intended to replace.

The inadequacy of public transport, combined with fears for public security and an opening of the market to vehicle imports, has led to a flood of private vehicle ownerships. There are nearly 650,000 motor vehicles in Jamaica, over 50 per cent more than 15 years ago.

There is a cost.  Jamaica spends over half a billion US dollars annually on vehicle imports, plus another US$200 million or more on spare parts. Around a third of the over 20 million barrels of petroleum imported annually is used for ground transportation.

While Jamaica has among the world’s highest road densities, further expanded with the construction of new highways, neither these developments nor the expansion or rehabilitation of existing roadways has kept pace with the explosion of private vehicle ownership.  The result: daily traffic snarls in the island’s cities and towns, exacerbated by the inadequacy of routine road maintenance. A boom in the construction of high-rise residential and commercial buildings without an expansion of infrastructure has helped to worsen the problem.

Yet, most of the vehicles stuck in the daily traffic gridlock are likely to be transporting a single passenger - obvious cases of individual overconsumption and inefficient use of resources.  These issues demand integrated – all of government - attention and solutions.

Jamaica’s Vision 2030 development programme, launched 17 years ago, discussed transportation in the context of citizens’ well-being, as well as the importance of “an efficient and effective transport sector … to economic progress”, including Jamaica’s vision of becoming a global logistics hub. 

“Without adequate infrastructure to facilitate the movement of people and goods, economic and social benefits will be limited,” the document warned.   With three years left on the clock, the development and execution policy initiatives expected in Vision 2030 have not kept pace with the intended time frame. 

Earlier this month, Mr Vaz said that the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is helping Jamaica to craft a Green Paper on public transport that will support a “modern, multi-modal system that strengthens connectivity, enhances safety and security and advances stability”. Which are very much the ideas of Vision 2030.

This newspaper looks forward to a Green Paper that, among other things, addresses:

• The interface between where people live and work, including spatial planning and urban renewal, and the design, management and maintenance of the island’s road network;
• The relationship between public transportation and energy use and, therefore, energy policy;
• Policies to incentivise the use of public transportation or disincentivise the proliferation of private ones; and 
• The impact of national security on public transportation.