Public transport in low-income countries – affordable, convenient and risky

The Christmas season is considered the busiest season throughout the Caribbean and historically, there are usually more road accidents during December because of the rush, high traffic, fatigue of drivers, poor maintenance of vehicles and drunk driving.

It is also the time of the year when minibus drivers are most reckless as they hustle to make a dollar. Over the next couple weeks, we will focus on road safety as we share segments of an article titled The Monster Bus. Road Safety and the Caribbean Minibus Culture: Taming a Monster by Eric Kipps, Road Safety Consultant.

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transport,” said Enrique Penalosa, former Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia. A very profound statement in the context of public transport. This is just another dissimilarity between developed and developing and underdeveloped countries. In our region the opposite holds true. Here the rich have cars, and the poor take public transport.

From Jamacia in the north to Suriname in the south, countries in the Caribbean share a common threat to their safety. I have particular reference to the public transport system provided by the Minibus. They are referred to by many different names in different countries like the Maxi Taxi in Trinidad, Robots in Jamaica, the ZR’s in Barbados or just Bus/Van in some islands. These names describe the most common mode of transport in the region. This however is not just a Caribbean thing but a low-income country transport situation.

The Caribbean like other low-income countries suffer from grossly underdeveloped public transport systems which have given rise to many informal modes of transport consisting of privately-owned buses, converted pick-up trucks and minibuses which have evolved to fill the gap.

Examples of Minibuses include: The Matatu in Kenya, the light buses of Hong Kong, the Minibuses of Signapore, Manila’s Jeepneys, the Colt of Jakarta, the Dolmus mini buses of Istanbul, the Dala Dala of Tanizania, the Tro-tro of Ghana, the Haitian Taptap, the Molue (moving morgues) and Danfo (flying coffins) of Nigeria, the Taxis of South Africa and Uganda.

These modes of transport have been able to flourish because the low fares charged are affordable to poor people. One of the most comprehensive studies on bus transit was commissioned by the World Bank in the late 1980’s. The study noted that several instances, private ownership of public transit offered cheaper service in the developing word when state-operated transit operators underwent a decline in service. The vehicles are also convenient, as they will stop anywhere to pick up or drop off passengers, and they do not adhere to any fixed time schedules. Against these advantages for poorer people in terms of mobility, there is a marked lack of safety.

The vehicles are generally overloaded with passengers and goods. The drivers speed is aggressive in their road behaviour and lack for other road users. The long hours that drivers are forced to work result in fatigue, sleep deprivation and reckless driving.

In an article published in the Jamaican Observer on Sunday, May 18, 2014, Garfield Higgins said that “scores of Jamaicans were emotionally, socially and physically incapacitated by the minibus system that existed from 1974 into the 1990s.” Essentially the transportation system created a necessity for hundreds of people to take a bath from on reason to another – after taking a bus ride, he said.

In an interview with The Sunday Gleaner Head of the Police Traffic Division, Senior Superintendent Radcliff Lewis, urged motorists to avoid the illegal or robot taxi. He made he call after nine persons were injured in an early morning traffic accident with some seriously so, Lewis said “When a person takes a robot taxi, the only thing they can get is injury and nothing more because those vehicles are not licensed to carry passengers”.

He said persons from this division have met with officials of the insurance and industry on several occasions and given them the names and vehicles numbers of the robots taxis. “I have told them not to insure these vehicles and the insurance companies still continue to insure these vehicles. So, what I have decided to do is to advice the injured persons to sue the insurance companies,” said Lewis.

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