A policy of traffic gridlock
Published:Thursday | November 24, 2011 | 12:00 AM
Allowing older second-hand vehicles to be imported into Jamaica may, as Industry Minister Christopher Tufton has said, revive the used-car business.
We question whether it is good economic policy.
The flow of older vehicles will not only mean opening wider the import spigot for these cars, but for the fuel on which they run and the spare parts that older vehicles necessarily need.
It is also more vehicles on badly kept roads that, in the first place, were not designed for the volume of cars that run on them. The upshot: gridlock, millions of man-hours lost in traffic rather than productively engaged in factories and offices.
Who ever heard about a decent public transportation system?
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