Desmond HenryTREASURE BEACH:
MARK MY word -- five to ten years from now, every significant residential open lot and real estate property in Kingston, will be standardised dumps filled with the wreckage of useless, rotting automobiles. In other words, be prepared for the arrival of the automobile junkyard right next door to that prime piece of real estate in which you had invested your life's savings.
Every empty lot, I predict, will reflect our growing passion for disorder or, put another way, our societal aversion to order. Automobile junkyards will be as standard Jamaican, as ackee and saltfish. Already all sidewalks along entry and exit highways like Washington Boulevard or roads leading off, are hotbeds of junk. People who bought real estate in these areas a few years ago, with the hope of residential property appreciation, are now finding themselves in the middle of a kind of commercial annexation they could never have imagined.
Illegal garages, junk dumps, metal carcasses, tyre stockpiles and all sorts of ugly overcrowds, share space with sound studios, fruit stands, taxi parks and all manner of disjointed illegalities. One gets the clear impression that anything that can be done in empty lots anywhere, will be done.
And that those with the responsibility for zoning the city for orderly development and human enjoyment couldn't give a damn about what goes on. Where, for example, does the KSAC's responsibility end, and Central Government's begin. Do they know? Do they care? Who will prevent the illegal commercial invaders on Washington Boulevard, for example, from driving away residential investors as was done in Richmond Park. Does that high school for girls at the top of the Boulevard recognise that very shortly it will be completely surrounded by ugly, unvarnished automobile junkyards? And that the need to change gear in their lives will no longer be just a figure of speech?
A major part of the problem, of course, has resulted from poor public transportation policies over the years. The convenience of unlimited importation of second-hand cars from Japan was far easier than a thoughtful examination of an efficient sustainable system. No matter that in so doing we exhausted a large volume of our foreign exchange earnings for consumption rather than production; and no matter that a city with small roads and poor traffic patterns, was already almost overcrowded with vehicular traffic. No matter that proven mass-movement commuter systems like railroads were allowed to crumble where they existed, or not to be considered where they should have been.
Thoughtful engineers have, for a long time, been suggesting the introduction of a rail transit system for Kingston, atop the existing arteries now occupied by its gullies. But you get the impression that Kingston commuters do not deserve solutions as creative as those.
Thus we perpetrate unbridled imports on non-existent highways fed by an illusion that the more cars you display physically, the more prosperous you are automatically.
Well, pretty soon Kingston would have reached its carrying capacity for cars and trucks that move, and those that can't move. The city's physical and aesthetic suffocation will be speeded up and it will gain notoriety as a classic in poor urban planning. And when in ten years time, a scholar or editorial writer asks the question: How did we get this way? - someone will point out that it all happened in open daylight in full view, and with full civic acquiescence.
The Bottom Line: The writing on the wall is not a forgery.
Desmond Henry is a marketing strategist based in Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth.
