Guyana is slowly but surely being strangulated with the traffic build-up on its roads. Roads are routinely referred to as “arteries” for the good reason that traffic is the lifeblood of any nation, transporting not only people from “point A” to “point B”, but the intermediate and finished goods that sustain and drive the economy.
But from what we are witnessing in the country today, particularly within Georgetown, including its environs and approaches, the country is about to have a massive embolism – which is what happens to arteries when they get blocked up. It can result in death.
Today the traffic jams into Georgetown in the morning and afternoons extend for miles on the East Coast and East and West Bank Demerara. Commuters routinely add two hours to their schedules in each direction if they are to realistically hope of making appointments or working hours. The toll on the nation’s productivity has not been measured as yet but from the experience of those countries that perform such quantifications, it has to be considerable.
While it is easy to criticise the planners and the authorities for allowing the housing development that feeds the traffic, to “grow like Topsy”, once our economy took off in the sustained way it has, it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to control.
It had been proposed that we should not encourage more development in Georgetown but to spread it across the country. Maybe the proposed Parking Meters might accomplish this.
The reality is that even though we may boast about our vaunted “83,000 square miles” as larger than the rest of Carcom combined, our actual inhabited space is even more cramped than the tiniest of those islands. It is but a mere 200 miles from Charity to Crabwood Creek and with few villages extending inland for more than a mile, it means our 780,000 populace are squeezed in a space of just 200 square miles.
Our settlement pattern has been compared to a string dipped in honey laid parallel to our Atlantic Coast and which attracts intermittent clumps of ants along its path. The string is our one and only major roadway and the clumps are our villages and settlements, the largest of which is Georgetown. And that roadway would not be called a “highway” by the kindest interpretation of the term, even though we insist on its usage.
The logic of that geographical and topological reality means that no matter where we build roads – unless to Lethem – they are going to be congested and precipitate vehicular embolism. Major interventions that include some bypass operations are demanded.
Several proposals to deal with the clogged arteries have been mooted, some launched and a few have actually been completed. We have the proposed bypass road from East Coast to the airport funded by an Indian loan and the ongoing widening of the East Coast and East Bank roadways.
There are also the proposals for a new Demerara Harbour Bridge. There have been several proposals in the letters pages which are to be encouraged, but we believe unless the situation is approached in a holistic and comprehensive manner, we will be fixing some particular embolic manifestations only to have more serious ones erupting somewhere else.
Take for instance the East Bank Roadway. No matter how wide we make it, because it bisects one of the most densely populated areas in Guyana, as presently designed, there will be the constant need for traffic to stop as pedestrians try to scurry over to the other side.
Studies have shown that such seemingly innocuous pauses cause cascading slowdowns of traffic through the length of the roadway, eventual precipitating much longer delays. The bypass is mandatory.
Other changes would be to have permanent, police on motorcycles patrolling the approaches to the Demerara Bridge, and issuing tickets to those vehicles that insist in “boring in”. But let us eschew the present piecemeal approach. It merely hardens the arteries.
