Peter Espeut
SOME YEARS ago, I got a wonderful Christmas present. For years I had to struggle through Old Harbour - in the morning and evening - in seemingly endless traffic jams. There was a long-standing plan - for decades - to build a bypass for Old Harbour. And then the Government borrowed money from Kuwait, and built it. In my Christmas column that year, I thanked the Government for my Christmas present.
Coming from the May Pen side, if I was going to a meeting with the fishers at Old Harbour Bay or at Welcome Beach, I would just bypass the bad roads of Freetown and Rasta Gully and Boops! Ah reach! The Kuwaiti road was oh so smooth!
Then the Government took it away. They entered into a money-making arrangement using my Christmas present as their equity, and now the smooth road cannot now take me from my house to either Old Harbour or Freetown because they blocked those exits. Back to the bad old days!
At the time Highway 2000 was announced, the building of the Old Harbour bypass had not yet begun. I could see what would happen, and I criticised their wastefulness, because it was clear that their expensive flyover at the eastern end could not fit into the toll road scheme; it would be useless, and tens of millions of Jamaican taxpayers' dollars would go down the drain. It was denied, but there it lies today: the most expensive concrete planter for wild bush in Jamaica!
BUMPY ALTERNATIVE
And now the Portmore toll bridge will not be profitable if the old causeway bridge is allowed to compete with it, and so the causeway bridge has to be removed from public use. The alternative is the already jammed-up Mandela Highway.
I continue to claim that we either don't know what conflict of interest is, or we don't care. The Government is a major shareholder in these toll roads, and will share substantially in the profits. The Government is an interested party, and it is a conflict of interest for them to be the ones setting toll rates, and being responsible for the health of the alternative routes, and being responsible for seeing to the welfare of the travelling public. It is in the Government's financial interest for there to be a high toll; it is in their financial interest for the alternative routes to be inadequate and unsuitable and long, to force people onto the toll roads.
A POLITICAL ART
Timing is a political art. You must sign the Memorandum of Uunderstanding before you announce the amount of the toll; you must announce a low toll before the General Election. Then all hell will break loose!
I thought these two toll roads were supposed to be parts of one highway from Kingston going west? Where do they link up? The Portmore bridge looks more and more like an add-on, a last minute cash cow tacked on to enhance the bottom line of the investors.
As I have written many times before, as the price of oil goes ever higher (the market is beginning to sense that this finite unrenewable resource is beginning to run out) government policy is tying us to a transportation policy based on private cars. Isn't it more rational to invest in rail transport to bring people from Portmore or May Pen into Kingston? I would take it! We are going to find ourselves in a few years with this long concrete white elephant that no one can afford to drive on. Because of a lack of vision, the people perish!
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and is executive director of an environment and development NGO.
