Shir­van Williams

The Pub­lic Trans­port Ser­vice Cor­po­ra­tion (PTSC) has of­fi­cial­ly opened a Dri­ve Train­ing Sim­u­la­tor Acad­e­my (DT­SA) at the VM­COTT (Ve­hi­cle Main­te­nance Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go) com­pound, Beetham Es­tate, Port-of-Spain. One of the fea­tures of the acad­e­my is a com­put­er- gen­er­at­ed sim­u­la­tion pro­gramme to be used by trainee bus dri­vers to get a bet­ter grasp of de­fen­sive dri­ving and oth­er skills need­ed to op­er­ate a bus.

Ronald Forde, PTSC gen­er­al man­ag­er, said he was proud that once again the com­pa­ny had tak­en the lead in the re­gion in up­grad­ing trans­porta­tion ser­vices. He was hap­py lo­cal bus dri­vers could be of­fered the best train­ing pos­si­ble. Forde said the ini­tia­tive would serve to make the PTSC providers of a safe and re­li­able trans­port sys­tem. He hint­ed soon GPS nav­i­ga­tion­al sys­tems would be placed in bus­es so they could be mapped elec­tron­i­cal­ly.

He al­so re­vealed plans to in­tro­duce an elec­tron­ic tick­et­ing sys­tem. Brent Ban­ton, vice chair­man of the Na­tion­al Road Safe­ty Coun­cil, said it was time to de­vel­op new strate­gic traf­fic leg­is­la­tion to help curb the mount­ing rate of road fa­tal­i­ties. He said PTSC had tak­en a step in the right di­rec­tion as it was in the busi­ness of trans­port­ing peo­ple and should do every­thing to make sure bus dri­vers made every ef­fort to prac­tice safe­ty.

In­vit­ed guests were treat­ed to a per­for­mance by Sam­raj Jaimun­gal, al­so known as "Rik­ki Jai", af­ter the acad­e­my was of­fi­cial­ly opened by Min­is­ter of Trans­port De­vant Ma­haraj. At­ten­dees al­so were al­lowed to test out the new equip­ment at the acad­e­my.