When you drive a BMW SUV, you don’t give a damn about bus service for working folks!
“Recently some bus routes were downgraded to a 2 hour schedule. That is fine during off peak hours, but how about every 30 minutes during rush hours? That will certainly help the poor working class and those who depend on the service.
Just an idea for the smart people at scheduling.”
contributed by BFP reader “M”
Time to limit cars & road construction.
Invest in public transit that works
When the bus schedule changes were announced, the government SAID that service would be maintained more frequently “where needed”. That didn’t last long, did it? What the government doesn’t seem to get is that the service has to be there, frequent and RELIABLE before greater numbers of passengers will trust the service enough to rely upon it for work.
We agree 100% with our reader “M”, but we’ll take that much further…
It is time to limit the number of 4 wheeled vehicles per household as Bermuda did years ago. It is time to stop building new roads and to start investing in public transit that works. Two hour bus service is a joke.
You want to empower ordinary working people? You want to give them more money in their pockets? Make personal autos a luxury and not a necessity as they are now.
You want to ease traffic congestion? Don’t build more roads for more cars. Instead, make it easy and affordable to own a scooter or small displacement motorcycle. Take the duty off motorcycles under 150cc and off electric motorcycles and bicycles.
We cannot keep going the way we’re going with the only “solution” being more personal autos on more and wider roads. This madness must stop!
Barbados Free Press 
There will be no need to legislate these type of actions. The way that the economy is heading, very soon we will look back at this time in a state of incredulity. We are heading for economic poverty with high levels of unemployment, crime & social disorder. When that happens there will be no place for luxury. Govt will be forced to slash imports as there will be no foreign exchange to pay for goods. Our credit rating will be junk status & tourists, who more & more are being seen as walking cash machines, will not come near this place……If this sounds bleak then just you wait for when this really kicks in…..I have no solutions I just hope that when we have hit bottom we do not wallow in our misery but pick ourselves up, turn our backs on so our called politicians & other self serving greedy (Riahanna word) and create something based on reality & rewards for hard work & creativity.
The CEO of the BTII is driving a new Honda CRV complete with leather seats valued at Bds$180,000.00. You have PS’s driving BMW worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, WHY?
Oh yes! Good idea! Cheaprer motor bikes! Aren’t we terrorised enough by these machines already?
@ Alice in Dreadland:
People like you who have vision by calling a spade a spade (calling it like it is) are usually labeled and branded as prophets of doom & gloom by the political lackeys and those suffering from intellectual myopia.
But I back you 100% in your prognosis. I suggest 1 to 2 years before the sh**t the fan!
So help me to understand this, send thousands to get uwi education and aspire towards a higher standard of living then with all the venom you could spit out curse educated well paid middle class people for driving CRVs and BMWs? Why? What is wrong with being rewarded for your status? this is not Cuba. for every CRV and BMW driver PS or CEO on the road there are 20 unemployed, dope smoking, dreadlock, bare backed, idiot sitting on the block with his underwear exposed oggling the sschool girls that walk by. Why not critise the un productive element of our society rather than the high achievers.
Simple but for working in the sub optimal civil service, these idiots could not get a job in the private sector with CRV or BMW cars.
@ wanna:
No one with a modicum of commonsense would argue against that people who work hard should not enjoy the fruits of their labour. What they will be critical of is the doublespeak spewing froth these same people who, either in their own capacity or as advisers to the political class, talk a lot about the need to: save foreign exchange, reduce fuel consumption and reliance on fossil fuels, awareness of the effects o climate change, greening the economy, and the utterances and admonitions go on ad nauseum.
You have to remember these are public workers paid from the sacrifices and pockets of taxpayers. In a small-ass 2×3 island like Barbados- in which you can’t drive at 60 KMS per hr for 5 mins without having to stop and worse so in rush hours-what is wrong with a 1600 cc vehicle (a/c of course!). Bermuda, a 2×3 place like Bim, but with a standard of material living way ahead of little England, has a restriction on the engine and physical size of non-commercial vehicles. Where can those high powered expensive vehicles, imported into Bim, be efficiently operated with its congested make-over cart roads, inferior fuels and high maintenance costs? Not even Bushy Park or Vaucluse mini strips can do justice to the engines and potential performance of these vehicles more suited to the long stretches of highways and far commuting distances found in those markets for which they were designed and marketed.
Live within your means and in harmony with your environment, Bajans! An ‘university’ education is just that:- the opportunity to broaden your mind and to think critically not myopically! Aping other people’s lifestyles without adjustments to suit your surroundings or the mood of the times (zeitgeist) is the behaviour of a fool and not befitting a graduate of UWI.
@millertheanunnaki. You assume too much. Of late, being a UWI graduate simply means you have a qualification and that you are assigned to a slightly higher pay grade. Though, it is quite astonishing[to me]that a man/woman could spend years, and in some cases, years and years receiving higher instruction and be unchanged in the process. It happens, I suppose. Yet, with limited access to formal education, information and technology, our forebears understood very well the idea of sustainable livelihoods, and its importance.
Whose good life? Greed is the principle on which the ‘good life’ is founded in the “developed/capitalist world”. It is greed that is punishing the environment, the economy and generally endangering the global community.”People living beyond their means or the means of others” (greed) have been factors common to both the US financial collapse and the Euro-zone debt crisis.
At the same time, you have a set of Afro-Caribbean peoples that have been very eager to make a clean break from the negative associations of the colonial past, and for some it has meant moving ever closer to metropolitan ways and lifestyles. Ways and lifestyles (culture) that as I mentioned before are underpinned and underscored by the virtue of greed. There is a clear crisis of identity in these parts, as we tend to embrace wholesale, the faith that is Western culture. Or, maybe not, it is only reasonable since the images and information we are bombarded with are hardly of African/Caribbean origin.
Lest I digress, my point is, the path that we have chosen or been told to choose so we might occasion the break from the ‘dark past’ is not sustainable. We have seen it. We are feeling it…Consider this, we no longer eat what we grow … if we grow, so we have to buy. Monies being redirected to service an increasing food import bill could be used as state subsidies for food production, and the establishment of better transport networks to facilitate greater and more cost-efficient inter-island trade. These efforts would constitute significant steps in bolstering Barbados’ food security and lowering dependency on unhealthy, foreign vittles.
Smart plan … How many parliamentarians are the beneficiaries of an university education? Hands up, please!
@ Sunny Knight:
Thanks for the elaboration!
You have put the case for the refashioning of the “educational fare” on offer at the UWI in order to address current socio-economic challenges much better than I could ever do!
Its hard to believe that in the 60’s we had a 15 minute bus to most of Bridgetown suburbs,and Silver Sands, and a 30 minute service elsewhere,which ably catered to those working in Bridgetown and the various industrial estates.
As a human being, Owen Arthur faces a number of serious challenges. Chief among which is the fact that ‘nobody believes him any-more because they know that his only aim is to become Prime Minister. Arthur also forgets easily. Secondly, he feels that there can be no Barbados without him, because he was Prime Minister for 14 years – although, even during the time he and his “Man-Friday” and “Mr. Spitty the Barker” – were travelling the Caribbean primarily to make money, working for other Governments (when he should have been at Parliament working for the pay he was collecting monthly) our country did not collapse.
Frankly, Owen Arthur has never accepted the will of the people to have rejected him for the DLP and quite frankly – he feels that, not only we in the DLP but that Barbadians also – do not have a clue. You can expect that even if the DLP does something remarkable – Owen Arthur will criticise it, for the simple reason that if Sinckler gets it right as Finance Minister, then that immediately proves that Arthur’s time has passed. This is where the “Owen Arthur politics of opportunism and desperation for headlines,” come in!
In the Weekend Nation of Friday, October 14th 2011, Owen Arthur was reported as “APPERING” to condemn a knife-attack on Senator Irene Sandiford-Garner – DLP Candidate for St. Andrew. Nothing wrong with that except that – Owen Arthur seeking to gain political mileage on the back of someone’s pain and misfortune, is horrible. But, given his desperation for headlines, Owen Arthur would not have missed, what he obviously sees as: “too good a delicious opportunity to be wasted.” But he has miscalculated yet again and that also points to poor and fast diminishing judgment on his part. His opportunistic and vulgar false-concern is quickly spotted when in the same paper (instead of a knife) the BLP sought to inflict an even greater wound on Sandiford-Garner for coming to the aid of Mia Mottley last Sunday by alleging that she (Irene) is incompetent, as regards the performance of her job as Par. Sec. in the Ministry of Health.
This is how Owen Arthur functions and it demonstrates the very worse of his tired and worn-out, old-style politics of the past. How could Owen Arthur be concerned about Irene’s health and well-being, when – while he was Prime Minister and she only a private citizen, he sought to publicly humiliate her over a personal health-care matter?
This is how Owen Arthur treats women and what I mean by “Owen Arthur’s politics of opportunism and desperation for headlines.” He does not remember that on the morning he should have been at Parliament, he called a media conference at the UWI to cuss Mia Mottley and to beg Barbadians to find her “unacceptable,” but could not remember the reason why they should. In the St. John by-election Barbadians again saw ‘his dingy Jekyll and Hyde character’ when he cussed Mara and said that she was ‘not suitable’ and is ‘an affront,’ yet when she was elected, he tried desperately to have a debate in the House to welcome her.
He fired Liz Thompson from the Senate for doing good work! We already know of his wild-side and that he has several children from numerous relationships, even while married, yet gave himself responsibility for HIV/AIDS.
But his comments about wanting to work with the very persons he tries to discredits as “poor-rakey” “wild-boys” – on crime, is an attempt to come across as a statesman, even though that space is already being occupied by Mia Mottley. Owen Arthur could never wish our government well because he wants to be Prime Minister at any and all cost.
Reaching across the aisle on crime (were it genuine, would be a good thing) but Arthur alleging to want to work with the Government on crime merely reminds the country that it was only recently that his Deputy was trying to score political points on crime. But Arthur! This is a special character!!!
You just can’t get this man to say a single word about Clico and its policy-holders, perhaps because he triggered their hardship but not tries to distance himself from the mess. Not a word on the government building at Warrens, even though he created the cesspool! Not a word on the corruption within the BLP, he is turning a blind eye to, which using the Pierhead as a distraction! But he now tries to score cheap political point from an unfortunate attack on Irene, while through the other corner of his mouth – cussing her from defending Mia Mottley. “Oh judgment thou art fled to brutish beasts and men have lost their reason.”
Why should cars be a luxury? So that only a few imperialist can own cars while the rest of us cant?
I would advocate for the privatization of the Transport Board routes. This, if achieved, would make for a doubly efficient bus service since it would be run for profit.