As the coun­try en­ters in­to what is fore­cast to be a heavy rainy sea­son, ex­perts warn that com­muters and busi­ness­es may once again shoul­der the con­se­quences of un­re­solved trans­port and drainage fail­ures—con­di­tions that rou­tine­ly give rise to flood­ing, crip­pling traf­fic con­ges­tion and mil­lions of dol­lars in eco­nom­ic loss­es.

Sus­tain­able trans­port ad­vo­cate Dr Trevor Townsend and civ­il en­gi­neer Fazir Khan who spoke to the Busi­ness Guardian at a con­fer­ence on Tues­day host­ed by the As­so­ci­a­tion of Pro­fes­sion­al En­gi­neers of T&T (APETT) un­der the theme “En­gi­neer­ing Our Fu­ture: Sus­tain­able, Smart, Re­silient,” said the heavy price for poor plan­ning, weak in­sti­tu­tion­al over­sight and in­con­sis­tent main­te­nance have be­come most vis­i­ble when the rains be­gin.

Townsend, an en­gi­neer and trans­porta­tion sys­tems spe­cial­ist who has worked in both the pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors dur­ing his ca­reer, fur­ther warned that the coun­try is al­ready los­ing mil­lions of dol­lars an­nu­al­ly due to traf­fic con­ges­tion, even be­fore the ad­di­tion­al strain caused by heavy rain­fall. He said con­ges­tion on the na­tion’s roads is too of­ten treat­ed as the main prob­lem, rather than what it re­al­ly is—a symp­tom of deep­er struc­tur­al fail­ures in plan­ning, in­vest­ment and man­age­ment.

“We’re on­ly 1.4 mil­lion peo­ple. There’s no rea­son why we can­not solve prob­lems of our trans­porta­tion sys­tem oth­er than the fact that there are changes in be­hav­iour and changes in in­vest­ment that we must do,” said Townsend, a re­tired se­nior lec­tur­er in trans­porta­tion en­gi­neer­ing.

Au­to-cen­tric plan­ning, he ar­gued, has left the coun­try over­ly de­pen­dent on pri­vate ve­hi­cles, mak­ing it par­tic­u­lar­ly vul­ner­a­ble when roads be­come im­pass­able.

Rainy sea­son con­di­tions, he said, ex­pose just how frag­ile the sys­tem is.

A cen­tral mis­con­cep­tion, ac­cord­ing to Townsend, is the be­lief that pub­lic trans­port is lim­it­ed to the state-owned Pub­lic Trans­port Ser­vice Cor­po­ra­tion (PTSC) not­ing, “Some­times peo­ple get con­fused when we talk about the pub­lic trans­port sys­tem. The pub­lic trans­port sys­tem is not just the PTSC.”

In re­al­i­ty, he not­ed, PTSC ac­counts for on­ly about five per cent of dai­ly trav­el.

The ma­jor­i­ty of pas­sen­gers re­ly on pri­vate maxi-taxis and route taxis, which form the true back­bone of pub­lic trans­porta­tion.

Townsend iden­ti­fied the ab­sence of a sin­gle au­thor­i­ty re­spon­si­ble for man­ag­ing pub­lic trans­porta­tion on a dai­ly ba­sis as a fun­da­men­tal is­sue. While over­sight nom­i­nal­ly rests with the Min­istry of Trans­port, he said there is no em­pow­ered in­sti­tu­tion co­or­di­nat­ing the sys­tem as a whole.

“If you ask who is in charge of the pub­lic trans­port sys­tem, you don’t get a clear an­swer. And that is a se­ri­ous prob­lem,” he said.

He al­so ques­tioned whether PTSC should be trans­formed in­to a sys­tem-wide man­ag­er or al­lowed to fo­cus on op­er­at­ing large bus­es—the role it is cur­rent­ly struc­tured to per­form.

“PTSC’s role needs to be clar­i­fied, for sure. In terms of, is PTSC the right or­gan­i­sa­tion to be a man­ag­er of the en­tire pub­lic trans­port, or should PTSC fo­cus on be­ing a big bus op­er­a­tor, op­er­at­ing in a par­tic­u­lar way?  So those are fun­da­men­tal ques­tions, and there­fore, if it’s the lat­ter in par­tic­u­lar, be­cause that’s what it’s or­gan­ised to do,  in terms of its garages and its staffing and its struc­ture,  then which in­sti­tu­tion is in charge of the sys­tem? And the an­swer is, there’s none.

“And there­fore, we have to cre­ate an in­sti­tu­tion and em­pow­er it and or­gan­ise it so that it could look at the en­tire pub­lic trans­port sys­tem on a day-to-day ba­sis,” Townsend ad­vised.

He was al­so crit­i­cal of ex­pen­sive, large-scale so­lu­tions that fail to ad­dress dai­ly re­al­i­ties, cit­ing that the aban­doned rapid rail pro­pos­al, which he said would have cost an es­ti­mat­ed TT$7 bil­lion to cap­i­talise while do­ing lit­tle to ease con­ges­tion.

“I’ve heard, but I have not seen an ap­proved pol­i­cy po­si­tion on an ap­proved plan to im­prove the pub­lic trans­port sys­tem. I have not seen it.

“I’ve heard about a num­ber of things. There was mon­ey spent on a num­ber of things. There was mon­ey spent on the pro­posed rapid rail sys­tem, which would have been one el­e­ment of it.

“It was some­thing that we felt was un­nec­es­sary, over-ex­pen­sive, and wouldn’t solve the prob­lem,” he said, adding that sim­i­lar con­clu­sions were reached by in­ter­na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment ad­vi­sors at the time.

Townsend in­stead ad­vo­cat­ed tar­get­ted in­vest­ments and flex­i­ble ap­proach­es, such as those used in the rur­al school trans­port sys­tem.

By char­ter­ing maxi-taxis to op­er­ate in an or­gan­ised way, more stu­dents were trans­port­ed at a low­er cost than would have been pos­si­ble with large bus­es — a sys­tem that has func­tioned for rough­ly 30 years.

“To get them straight in­to school at a low­er cost to this coun­try than if we were to run a big bus there. That’s just an ex­am­ple of what kind of thing we should be look­ing at,” Townsend added.

He al­so raised con­cerns about the need for elec­tri­fi­ca­tion and oth­er al­ter­na­tive fu­els, warn­ing that with­out such changes, the costs as­so­ci­at­ed with con­ges­tion and de­clin­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty would con­tin­ue to rise has he not­ed, “It’s get­ting worse.”

How­ev­er, even the best trans­port plan­ning, he warned, would strug­gle with­out par­al­lel im­prove­ments in drainage and flood man­age­ment — an is­sue tak­en up by Khan, a civ­il en­gi­neer.

Khan, al­so pres­i­dent of the Joint Con­sul­ta­tive Coun­cil (JCC), shared that his firm, Al­pha En­gi­neer­ing, is cur­rent­ly mod­el­ling the South Oropouche Riv­er Basin, where com­mu­ni­ties such as Wood­land face re­cur­ring flood risk.

He said tech­ni­cal stud­ies are es­sen­tial, but res­i­dents are pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned with im­ple­men­ta­tion and re­lief.

Be­yond in­di­vid­ual projects, he iden­ti­fied a na­tion-wide fail­ure of main­te­nance as the most se­ri­ous weak­ness in flood man­age­ment as he point­ed to clogged drains, poor clear­ing of wa­ter­ways and plas­tic pol­lu­tion as con­trib­u­tors to flood­ing, and ques­tioned why stronger laws and en­force­ment were still ab­sent.

“And we have to ask our­selves, why are there not laws with re­spect to re­duc­tion of plas­tic or peo­ple in­volved in re­mov­ing them from the wa­ter­ways, etc. And that is some­thing that I think, as a pol­i­cy, the gov­ern­ment should look at im­ple­ment­ing laws to re­duce that sort of lit­ter. But there is a man­age­ment is­sue and a com­mit­ment is­sue with re­spect to the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions ac­tu­al­ly im­ple­ment­ing what they’re sup­posed to be do­ing in terms of main­te­nance of the drainage sys­tems,” Khan stat­ed.

On whether the coun­try’s drainage and wa­ter­ways net­work should be re­designed, Khan urged cau­tion stat­ing, “We are a small is­land de­vel­op­ing state with com­pet­ing de­mands for land. Cre­at­ing en­tire­ly new wa­ter­cours­es is not al­ways re­al­is­tic.”

How­ev­er, he not­ed that many ex­ist­ing sys­tems re­main struc­tural­ly ad­e­quate.

“In Port-of-Spain, for ex­am­ple, those chan­nels are over 200 years old, and they have han­dled flood­ing rea­son­ably well. But with sea lev­el rise and high­er tides, there is work that needs to be done, and sys­tems that can be aug­ment­ed,” he added.

Both ex­perts stressed that with­out de­ci­sive ac­tion the costs to pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, pub­lic con­fi­dence and eco­nom­ic growth would con­tin­ue to rise.