Editorial | Shaw must work on transport policy

If it were merely sentiment, Audley Shaw, the transport minister, would need to do nothing more to convince this newspaper of the worth of a full-blown reintroduction of Jamaica’s railway system.

Because when the passenger trains stopped running three decades ago, we, like many others, felt as though Jamaica was forfeiting an important bit of its history. After all, the island was the second of the British colonies, after Canada, where an organised passenger rail was introduced 177 years ago.

Further, as we have lamented several times in these columns, it is almost cultural vandalism that successive administrations allowed the island’s picturesque, postcard-quality Georgian railway stations to become crumbling derelicts.

Yet, while we are sentimentally stirred by Mr Shaw’s pledge last week that “we will reopen Jamaica’s rail service”, he owes it to the public, as we suggested last month, to place any such initiative in a larger policy context.

For that matter, the issue is not only about the railway. It also has to do with the minister’s announcement of the planned acquisition of new buses for the state-owned Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC) and the continued expansion of the network of aerodromes.

To state the issue baldly, what Minister Shaw delivered last week about public transportation in his contribution to Parliament’s Sectoral Debate was a hodgepodge of declarations that lacked policy coherence. In his defence, he might claim that he is still new on the job – having only been appointed in January – and, therefore, has not had time to put his policies together with coherence. In which event, he should have said so.

There are several reasons why we take this matter very seriously, not least being one which Mr Shaw touched upon in his promise to have the trains running again: the critical importance of transportation to the national economy.

Efficient economies have good systems to transport people to and from their jobs, and to haul goods from one place to the next.

UNRELIABLE SYSTEM

Jamaica does not have a good public transportation system. Commuters travel mostly by unreliable, often overcrowded buses and route taxis that generally do not adhere to rules. This poorly regulated, and often unsafe, system is a significant driver of private vehicle ownership in the island. It is in that context that we hoped that Mr Shaw would have used the opportunity to bring fresh, creative thinking to the public transportation debate.

Indeed, he is right about the ability of trains to move large amounts of passengers and freight without having to travel on congested roads that fall under continuous pressure for expansion. That Jamaica’s locomotives continue to haul alumina and bauxite from factories to ports gives a sense of what is possible.

But while diesel-powered locomotives slowly hauling coaches over narrow-gauge tracks may be appealing to tourists and nostalgic Jamaicans, there are likely to be questions about their suitability to be part of a 21st-century mass transit system, and of the Government’s likelihood of finding investors to modernise the railway. It has been attempting to do so for decades.

If the capital is indeed found (which we hope will happen), there needs to be an explanation of the railway’s future relationship with a development that has been one of the hindrances to its resuscitation since the Jamaica Railway Corporation (JRC) was mothballed in the early 1990s: the ongoing buildout of the island’s system of highways.

At the same time, a coherent transport policy also has to explain the assumptions upon which additional investment in, and the expansion of, aerodromes are predicated, given that the ongoing extension and upgrading of the existing highway system continues to lessen travel times between the island’s two international airports, in Kingston in the southeast, and Montego Bay in the northwest, and everywhere else in the island.

TRANSITIONING TO CLEANER PRACTICES

Additionally, Mr Shaw reported that 70 new buses are being acquired for the JUTC, which serves the capital. Five of them will be electric vehicles (EVs) and 20 will be powered by compressed natural gas (CNG). The obvious rationale for this is the continued testing of new energy sources as part of efforts to lessen greenhouse gas emission by the JUTC fleet. But there was no indication of the reasons upon which this particular mix, at this time, was predicated, or of how the JUTC planned a broader transition to cleaner fuels.

Neither did the minister address a strategy for the wider public transport system’s conversion to electric vehicles, given the energy ministry’s projection that 12 per cent of the vehicles on Jamaica’s roads will be EVs by 2030. On the basis of a direct replacement of the existing fleet of registered vehicles, that would translate to between 65,000 and 70,000 EVs. That, by some estimates, would remove between 300,000 and 322,000 of carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmosphere annually.

Nor did Mr Shaw speak to another crucial issue: a plan to reverse the trend of private vehicle ownership to a greater use of public transportation. This has the potential to deliver two significant benefits – less greenhouse gas emissions and saving on the country’s oil import bill, especially at a time when the price of petroleum is on an upward spiral.

Before the latest price hike, Jamaica spent over US$1 billion importing approximately 21 billion barrels of oil a year, about a third of which goes to power ground transportation, including those used by commuters. A rationalised public transport system would lessen this.

Mr Shaw has serious work to do. He must get on with it. The matter is urgent.