The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

I am stirred to respond to Alexis Burrows’ letter in today’s Tribune (December 17, 2012) regarding his experiences at Road Traffic and his suggestions for improvements.

I recall that in the ‘70s (and possibly earlier), all car licensing was computerised to the extent that one collected a renewed license from a tray of pre-printed licenses.

Of course, there were other issues surrounding the system at that time, but one aspect that seems to be speeded up is the inspection of one’s motor vehicle.

Much more careful inspections were carried out then including being required to demonstrate that your hand-brake was effective. Now it is a lot quicker and sounds something like “lights brake horn wipers signals” come up and pay the fee!

I make sure never to visit Road Traffic at the end of the month as I don’t wish to experience what an acquaintance went through last month when it took him four hours to get his license. As he explained it, people were coming in, jumping the queue and marching right up to the counter. He claimed he saw “monetary inducements” being slipped to the clerks serving the long suffering public who were lined up waiting to pay the legal fee and to get out of there as soon as possible. (As I was not present I therefore cannot verify that statement as being true).

Of course, a lot of the delay is caused by the clerks having to write up the new licences by hand and his (Mr Burrows) suggestion is to have the system computerised.

He and many others like him may like to know that the Road Traffic Department issued a request for proposals (RFP) for computer software back in April 2007 to which a company with which I am associated and several other companies responded.

This RFP, as seems to be the practice with proposals from government departments, only allowed a very short time period for a very detailed response. Keep in mind that this was to be a more or less custom system designed to meet the specific requirements of the Bahamas. In response, my company proposed a modified system from Bermuda which has very similar laws and requirements to those of the Bahamas.  This proposal required a number of us to devote ourselves and our new partners in Bermuda many hours over two or three weeks just to put a proposal together which met all the requirements.

The result was that our proposal was summarily dismissed, as it turned out in favour of a much more costly proposal from one of our rivals. The latter proposal was not implemented because (so I understand) it was too costly! So here we are today. The current situation is that we Bahamians are stuck with the same old system of licensing and registration that has been in place for decades.  “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”.

STEPHEN KNOWLES

Nassau,

December 17, 2012.