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Monday, July 14, 2025

Maxi driver killed at City Gate hub

by

Peter Christopher
2432 days ago
20181116

A maxi taxi dri­ver was killed af­ter struck by the dri­ver of an­oth­er minibus which was re­vers­ing at City Gate tran­sit hub on Fri­day.

Wendy Wescott, 57, of La Hor­quet­ta, had mo­ments ear­li­er parked her maxi near the Maxi Dri­vers can­teen and left to use the wash­room fa­cil­i­ty around noon.

Eye­wit­ness­es said as she emerged from the can­teen and was re­turn­ing to her ve­hi­cle, tragedy struck as at­tempt­ed to cross the as­phalt.

An­oth­er maxi which was re­vers­ing on the com­pound struck her and she was killed al­most in­stant­ly.

The dri­ver of the maxi said he was not aware she was be­hind his bus.

Wescott’s rel­a­tives were at City Gate on Fri­day, but af­ter see­ing her body be­ing re­moved by un­der­tak­ers, were too dis­traught to speak to the me­dia.

Pres­i­dent of Route Two Maxi Taxi As­so­ci­a­tion Li­nus Phillip said Wescott was well known and loved by the com­mu­ni­ty of maxi taxi dri­vers.

He said the in­ci­dent was a “haz­ard wait­ing to hap­pen” due to the lack of traf­fic man­age­ment and en­force­ment with­in the trans­port hub.

Phillip said many of the pedes­tri­an warn­ing signs, in­clud­ing a pedes­tri­an cross­ing near plat­form six, were in­stalled by the Maxi Taxi As­so­ci­a­tion.

“All them signs the as­so­ci­a­tion put them up, we spend mon­ey and put them up. All we are ask­ing for is en­force­ment of those signs, and we not even get­ting that,” said Phillip.

“First when we ask for the en­force­ment they say it have no sign. We went out, we bought the signs and we put them up, all those road mark­ings, those mark­ings were done by the as­so­ci­a­tion,” said Phillip.

De­spite the signs, sev­er­al mem­bers of the pub­lic par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing rush hour, queue up along the road­way with­in the trans­port hub to get max­is.

Tran­sit Po­lice are as­signed to the City Gate hub, but Phillip said the tran­sit of­fi­cers faced se­ri­ous man­pow­er is­sues as well.

‘Tran­sit of­fi­cers, they get 30 of­fi­cers to­day and by next week 30 gone,” said Phillip.

“It’s not at­trac­tive to peo­ple to come on board. What you have is like they use it as a step­ping stone for the po­lice force. That is what is be­ing used for by most of­fi­cers be­cause most of them are trans­fer­ring out to dif­fer­ent de­part­ments with­in the Po­lice Ser­vice.”

Phillip said the group had sent pro­pos­als to the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port to over­haul the man­age­ment of the trans­port hub.

How­ev­er, Phillip said they got no re­sponse to the pro­pos­al.


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