Geisha Kow­lessar

Traf­fic lights will be in­stalled at the Roxy Round­about with the aim of eas­ing the grid­lock and frus­tra­tion caused to dri­vers by the new traf­fic plan in west Port-of-Spain. Di­rec­tor of High­ways Roger Ganesh said yes­ter­day in­fra­struc­tur­al work was ex­pect­ed to be­gin at the round­about this week to in­stall at least two traf­fic-light poles. He said the lights would be work­ing by the end of next week.

"The longest wait would be get­ting the pow­er in­stalled. But once we have con­nec­tion, the lights would be up and run­ning," Ganesh added. He said the lights would reg­u­late the flow of traf­fic in two phas­es. The first phase would deal with the heavy flow of traf­fic com­ing from the West­ern Main Road and Tra­garete Road. The sec­ond would con­cen­trate on the mi­nor traf­fic flow as dri­vers make their way from St Clair.

Ganesh said in­stead of the in­stal­la­tion of the lights, an­oth­er op­tion con­sid­ered was the re­moval of the round­about com­plete­ly. How­ev­er, this was ruled out as the fea­ture it­self serves as a "traf­fic-calm­ing de­vice" as nor­mal­ly used in the Unit­ed King­dom to con­trol the speed of traf­fic at the in­ter­sec­tion. "This would main­tain the 50-kilo­me­tres-per-hour speed as man­dat­ed," Ganesh added.

Ganesh and a team of per­son­nel from the high­ways di­vi­sion again vis­it­ed west Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day to mon­i­tor the plan so far. Day two of the new plan was not much dif­fer­ent from Mon­day, when it was first put in­to prac­tice, Ganesh added. He said there were still some teething prob­lems, but promised by next week dri­vers would no longer en­counter con­ges­tion at Mu­cu­rapo and Long Cir­cu­lar Road.

Many dri­vers, Ganesh added, were not yet mak­ing use of dif­fer­ent op­tion­al routes, as in the case of those com­ing from Mar­aval. "A lot of peo­ple are not op­ti­mis­ing their op­tions. They are stick­ing to the route they are ac­cus­tomed to, and then they get stuck some­where in the jam." The to­tal cost of the plan is yet to be fi­nalised. Close to $1 mil­lion was spent on signs.

Ganesh said while the Works Min­istry sup­plied about 33 per cent of the signs, the rest were out­sourced to a pri­vate con­trac­tor. "The min­istry did all the ma­jor signs, in­clud­ing the very large ones. "The pri­vate con­trac­tor did the rest, in­clud­ing the stop signs," Ganesh added.