Published On:Monday, August 30, 2010

By PACO NUNEZ

Tribune News Editor

THE FRACAS over the new Baillou Hill Road and Market Street one-way system was to a certain extent inevitable. Big problems tend to inspire big solutions, and considering the size and scope of Nassau's traffic dilemma, it was only a matter of time before the latest far-reaching alleviation plan led to the government butting heads with someone.

The Ministry of Works assured the public all will be back to normal once work on the corridor is complete, but the adage that you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs is cold comfort to businessmen who say their earnings have been affected.

Looking beyond the resultant legal wrangle, the dispassionate observer can't help but conclude that whatever the scale and sophistication of the government's plan, it cannot amount to much in the long-run - for the simple reason that, reroute the roads all you will, there are simply too many cars on this island.

I once heard it suggested that laid end to end, there are probably more miles of cars on New Providence than actual road. What is for certain is that, due largely to geographical and historical accident, Bahamians find themselves with far more disposable income than good sense. In the absence of adequate regulations, most of us will drive anything we can get our hands on.

In many places around the world with similar traffic problems, the lack of dependable public transportation is to be blamed for the over-dependence on cars. While this is very much the case in Nassau, our accumulation complex with regard to private vehicles is slightly more complicated.

Bahamians have become infected by an especially irrational strand of materialism that leads to individuals who do not have the financial means to project status settling for one or two of its trappings.

Thus, it becomes desirable for one to own a car - be it a rust bucket emitting its death rattle for all to hear - even in the absence of a job or home of one's own.

In some other places, people gravitate to public transportation as it becomes safer, cleaner and more reliable. In the Bahamas, people would have to be dragged kicking and screaming.

Generally speaking, people do not enjoy being dragged about, and are unlikely to vote for those who have treated them thus - a fact not lost on politicians.

Faced on the one hand with members of the public who demand an end to the daily grind of traffic jams, and on the other, with those who would be outraged by any radical attempt to curtail the use of private vehicles - mandatory car pooling, for example - successive governments have done the predictable; spend huge amounts of our money on large-scale, headline grabbing, but ultimately stopgap projects.

But was there another way?

Very early on in the PLP's 2002-7 administration, the new environmental czar, MP Ron Pinder announced that government planned to implement vehicle emissions testing soon.

Similar promises had been made by administrations in the past, so The Tribune decided to impose a campaign of mild harassment on Mr Pinder, just to see if there was anything to it other than political hot air.

Mr Pinder repeatedly assured us a law regulating the level of toxic pollutants emitted by vehicles was imminent. After nearly five years and a thousand excuses, Mr Pinder offered some vague mumblings to the effect that the scheme proved to be more complicated than first envisioned, and had hit some stumbling blocks. The PLP lost the government to the FNM and nothing was heard about the matter for more than a year.

Then, Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham, on his way to the United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen last year, announced that the government expected to pass new legislation in 2010 to create emission standards to be enforced throughout the country.

Environment Minister Earl Deveaux said emissions and the quality of fuel imported into the Bahamas could be controlled through a multi-agency government effort.

Speaking in December, Mr Deveaux said he hopes the Road Traffic Department would be working to improve air quality by measuring the pollutants emitted by buses, trucks and cars within a year.

But, he said, first the quality of the fuel we import must be controlled by testing to ensure it meets certain standards.

"Once we get the standard of fuel, we will deal with the emissions," Mr Deveaux said.

As the year ticks away, we shall see what happens, but the sceptic could be forgiven for wondering if the delay over fuel import quality means emissions standards will again become lost in the vagaries of political and economic reality.

Indeed, as it turns out, the fuel testing/emissions scheme is part of another "big project" - a 15-year plan to rid the Bahamas of all dependence on fossil fuels. In the short term, the FNM plans to tackle pollution from vehicle emissions by charging higher licensing fees for heavy vehicles with large engines.

Yet it stands to reason that simply implementing a realistic emissions standard would do much more to cut pollution. Certainly, adopting a first world standard immediately would be disastrous for auto dealers and many drivers, but why not a hurdle low enough to allow all but the worst offenders, the poison-spewing decrepit old junk heaps, to pass?

And, of course, all of us who are daily oppressed by these mobile Chernobyls know their pervasiveness has become such that there would also be an immediate positive effect on traffic flow were they to be pulled from the road.

Nevertheless, it would not be fair to suddenly leave large numbers of people without a method of getting about, and this is where the need for a safe, dependable method of public transportation would come in.

Unfortunately, far from acting as a form of relief from our traffic woes, the jitney system has itself become one of the single largest contributors to the public's problems and frustrations on the road.

I have been assured the majority of bus drivers are good operators let down by the bad apples in their midst. Be that as it may - a rotten fruit, given time, will spoil the entire batch. Left long enough, it will rot the barrel as well.

Far too many bus drivers are reckless, shameless cowboys, with no thought for anything other than beating the competition to the next fare. In their frantic hunt for daily profit, they are happy to break all recognised standards of courtesy, decency and legality.

Not that they can be blamed for acting like desperadoes - the world in which they operate is something of a lawless frontier where fortune favours the bold. Whatever the cause of the police's inability to enforce our road laws, particularly with regard to jitneys, there is one sure way to deal with it - remove the system of individual bus franchise holders completely.

Around the time Ron Pinder began promising emissions standards, the Ministry of Transportation under Glenys Hanna-Martin was formulating plans for unified bus system to bring all operators under one entity in which both private owners and the government would have a stake.

Drivers were to be placed on steady salaries, thereby removing the motivation to force their way around, through, and sometimes literally over, the rest of us in an effort to make a fare.

Even before the PLP lost in 2007, this fantastic idea began losing momentum as bus drivers protested, eventually disappearing from public discourse completely.

Then in June 2008, the government announced that the unified system was merely one of several options for reform of the sector being considered.

In the meantime, the "100-Day Challenge" was launched. This involved encouraging all bus drivers to be more courteous, drive more carefully and clean up their vehicles.

It is hard to see this having had any effect whatsoever, and predictably, no results or progress reports were ever made public.

In the end, the unified bus system, like the emissions standards scheme, went the way of most commonsense ideas - subsumed into larger plans to be realised at some vague point in the imaginary future unlikely to ever have its parallel in reality.

Had anyone thought to combine them into a single policy, it could have meant the killing of two onerous birds with one stone for the public - an immediate reduction in the prevalence of putrid black smoke on our streets and a considerable easing of traffic congestion.

It would have also meant a substantial benefit in terms of the upkeep of another ambitious scheme, the Nassau Downtown Redevelopment Project. Bay Street shopowners complain constantly that the solid double lane of traffic lasting throughout the day is off-putting to tourists, and that they are forced to spend thousands of dollars in paint each year in an effort to disguise the layer of greasy black soot deposited on their establishments by vehicle emissions.

And yet, such a scheme will probably never come about because, politically speaking, the numbers just don't add up.

The art of politics often comes down to being seen to do something constructive in the eyes of the majority of the public, while avoiding damaging the particular interests of too many individuals.

Thus, a tax on heavier vehicles might upset a few car dealers and those with a penchant for cars with big engines, and new one-way systems might draw the ire of a handful of merchants, but most people can take comfort in the promise of a 15-year environmental plan and a large-scale road improvement project.

On the other hand, for those in the popularity game, the mass of irresponsible people driving toxic disasters on wheels, and the several hundred bus drivers and franchisees making a tidy profit on our lawless roads - not to mention their relations and dependents - add up to far too many voting individuals to upset at one time.

* What do you think?

pnunez@tribunemedia.net