Dear Editor,
I write in complete agreement with your editorial of Wednesday February 1, 2023 regarding our awful minibus culture, and to make a few small but important suggestions. Well, one important suggestion is that, in one small step, we immediately – and with finality – remove the chaos being inflicted on society by minibus operators.
Yes, I know you want to know how, because that’s the aspect that’s important. Here is how – by removing the competition that exists between them. What’s wrong with the competition between minibus operators, you ask? Their competition for passengers is what pushes them to speed and race each other, and do other lawless, unconscionable things that they feel will give them an advantage over other competing operators.
What happens when we remove the competitiveness? If they were all hired by the Government, and were Public Servants (or by a private company and were employees), each equally receiving a standard flat salary, would they still desperately see the need to do things (like overloading, using touts, etc) to try to earn more than each other? No. Their chances of earning more than each other would be removed.
Government needs to step in (or arrange for a company to step in) and hire these minibuses and their operators for fixed rental fees and salaries. A certain shift over to a new Guyana, where it is illegal to operate a bus not rented/contracted by the State, is necessary – and is urgent.
Once the buses on the road are all under the control of the State, the State would have more control over the behaviour of bus operators, and we (the citizens through the State) would be able to suspend or fire them as we see fit for improper behaviour and illegalities.
“Public transportation” does not mean transportation supplied to the public. It means transportation provided by the State to her citizens (and not by private individuals who own and operate buses etc). Public transportation is provided at no cost to the Government, as the Government gets cash to pay bus owners and operators by selling bus passes to commuters, who would use the passes on the buses instead of cash. The sale of bus passes would raise enough funds for the State to rent the buses on the road and pay salaries to the bus drivers driving them. And the price for a trip in a bus would not need to go up to facilitate this shift either.
Imagine a Guyana in which a bus operator no longer sees the need to stop in the middle of the road to grab another passenger for his already full bus, but would pick up passengers only if he has space; and would pick up only those who are at the bus stops, because whether he fills his bus or not, he would still get the same salary at the end of the month. His job is to drive around a route and collect passengers, and he does it knowing that overloading his bus is pointless, because it won’t bring him any extra cash. Speeding is equally useless. There would be no more need for that kind of desperation. Imagine it. Imagine what our roads would be like.
For one thing, there would be way less privately-owned cars, and less traffic congestion on the road, as more citizens would finally feel safe enough to opt to use public transportation to save money. Car owners in more developed countries are accustomed to using comfortable public transportation and saving their cars and gas money for trips where public transportation won’t take them. Gustavo Petro, Mayor of Bogotá, rightly said, “A developed country isn’t a place where the poor have cars; it’s where the rich use public transportation.”
Owning and driving a car in Guyana should not be a status symbol. How many of us have looked at the traffic jams in Guyana and seen how, in most cases, each car contains only one person? What’s going to happen when every person can finally afford a car? Where will we place the blame?
Do we love our country and countrymen enough to get this done now? Or do we have to wait for enough foreigners to come here and insist that this present backward system be changed, before we act?
Sincerely,
John M Fraser, LLB
