The lawlessness at the Route 45 minibus park

Dear Editor,
I recently started driving a bus on Route 45 after regular work hours to earn some extra money to support my family. A major challenge with the Route 45 park is that sections of it are completely taken over and overrun by vendors, North of Demico, with some vendors and customers parking their vehicles directly where the Route 45 buses go to pick up passengers in front of Stabroek Market itself, completely blocking up the entrance to the 45 bus park and forcing the Route 45 buses to block the carriageway around that area as they are now forced to join the line on the road itself, versus where the vendors and their customers’ cars block up the Route 45 entrance.
This apparently happens in the afternoons/evenings. While I understand that vendors are hustling to make a living, they cannot agree to block up the public transport system in what is probably the most congested area in Guyana. They are encouraged to see bus drivers and passengers trying to get where they are going every day. They simply cannot, and it is unacceptable to occupy and become a public nuisance on the Route 45 bus park, or for that matter any other bus park. Please use discretion and consideration of others and the public interest when choosing a spot to sell. The basic rule is if you are offending someone where you sell, you shouldn’t be there. Ask the Town Clerk of the Mayor and City Council for advice.
While I am familiar with the touts on this route, I was taken aback by one who was brazen enough to give me a well-articulated script on his opinion of the ‘system’ on the Route 45 park, even detailing that on Mondays through Fridays touts have to be paid $120 or above for every bus loaded (up from $100), and $200 on Saturdays (the Police advised that touts have no right or authority to be paid, so to pay them is to encourage racketeering in its most basic form. Touts are a notorious public nuisance whose existence continues to extract tremendous taxes on both drivers and passengers on a daily basis). As if this was not enough, he went on to explain that only certain buses could work “after-hours” (whatever that time happened to be) and that I could not. This is a ‘tout,’ someone of no good repute, telling a driver, hustling to balance his family budget, of a bus owned by someone who invested millions into putting it on the road to earn money for his family also, that he, an unregulated nobody, was not allowing me to drive in accordance with the laws of Guyana to earn an income, and further that he ‘laid out the rules’ for me, that he ‘runs things,’ and that he was denying the owner of the bus also, an income from his investment. Later Saturday evening around 8 o’clock while I was in the line in the park, he appeared at the driver’s side of my bus and reiterated that he meant what he said, that I couldn’t pick up passengers on the park.
Some other bus drivers and some car drivers working with him arranged their vehicles so that I was ultimately forced out of the line. This particular tout is someone Police would do well to have a conversation with since in addition to his apparent assertion of an organised racket on the Route 45 bus park, he also intimated a few days earlier in a public dialogue on the park that he liked boys. The Police and Child Welfare should be interested to find out who those boys are and what he was having them do to satisfy his sexual appetite.
Following on the heels of my run-in with that tout Saturday night, I was greeted by a group of Route 45 bus drivers who were apparently in league with the tout, who together orchestrated their buses to keep me from loading passengers.
One particular bus driver, BKK 4233, was apparently coordinating the other bus drivers and apparently had no regard for the Police, even after I returned to tell them that I had reported the matter to the Traffic Department at Brickdam, and that I preferred not to create problems with the Police for them to take away from them earning an income. He told me that I would have to get off the Route 45 zone, and continued to direct the other bus drivers to block me from picking up passengers. I would encourage the Police to get deeper down into the racket orchestrated by this driver and identify and investigate all the touts harassing both bus drivers and passengers on the Route 45 bus park.

Yours faithfully,
Craig Sylvester