I have tak­en note of an ar­ti­cle in yes­ter­day's pa­per, where Dr Car­son Charles has re­peat­ed the Prime Min­is­ter's fan­ci­ful claim that the PNM's rail­way project will cost $60 bil­lion.

That cost es­ti­mate is pre­pos­ter­ous. I have in my pos­ses­sion all of the doc­u­men­ta­tion and stud­ies for the rail­way project done for the PNM pri­or to the 2010 elec­tion, and noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth.

Any es­ti­mate pro­duced for the UNC-led Gov­ern­ment af­ter the elec­tion is high­ly ques­tion­able and not worth the pa­per it was print­ed on, and it is note­wor­thy that this crazy es­ti­mate of $60 bil­lion has on­ly sur­faced in 2015, just be­fore a gen­er­al elec­tion, and five years af­ter the PNM demit­ted of­fice.

Fur­ther, if the project is not vi­able, why did the UNC-led Gov­ern­ment, through the Min­istry of Trans­port, pub­licly ad­ver­tise for ex­pres­sions of in­ter­est on Jan­u­ary 26, 2012 for the fi­nanc­ing, de­sign, con­struc­tion and op­er­a­tion of a rail­way sys­tem along the east-west cor­ri­dor?

They can't have it both ways–it is ei­ther the project makes sense or it does not, and it is an in­dis­putable fact that al­most two years af­ter as­sum­ing pow­er, the present ad­min­is­tra­tion ini­ti­at­ed the pro­cure­ment process for a rail­way project. Un­for­tu­nate­ly for them, they bun­gled the process and breached the Cen­tral Ten­ders Board Act, hence the rea­son why their rail­way project nev­er got off the ground.

I am sat­is­fied that our es­ti­mate of $10 bil­lion for the rail­way project, which is in­clu­sive of civ­il works, align­ment struc­tures, sta­tions, rail sys­tems, util­i­ty re­lo­ca­tion, rolling stock and oth­er re­lat­ed costs is re­al­is­tic, and we have no in­ten­tion of wast­ing time ban­ter­ing with the UNC over this mat­ter. They had their chance to in­tro­duce an ef­fi­cient mass trans­porta­tion sys­tem in Trinidad dur­ing the last five years, and to deal with our chron­ic traf­fic con­ges­tion once and for all, and blew it.

In­deed, rather than deal­ing with the crit­i­cal is­sue of traf­fic grid­lock, they have wast­ed the last five years with emp­ty talk, idle promis­es and pos­tur­ing about an im­prac­ti­cal rapid bus sys­tem, with­out ac­quir­ing a sin­gle rapid bus, or ex­plain­ing which new roads these mag­i­cal bus­es will dri­ve on.

Colm Im­bert