Plans are in place to make Wright­son Road a six-lane road­way, head of the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port’s Pro­gramme for Up­grad­ing Roads Ef­fi­cien­cy Unit (PURE) Hay­den Phillips has said.

This road work is ex­pect­ed to be­gin at the start of the next fis­cal year.

Phillips made the state­ment on Wednes­day as the Par­lia­ment’s Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee on Land and Phys­i­cal In­fra­struc­ture con­tin­ued its pub­lic in­quiry in­to the ef­fec­tive­ness of mea­sures in place to re­duce traf­fic con­ges­tion on the na­tion’s roads.

He was re­spond­ing to ques­tions from Sen­a­tor Nigel De Fre­itas as to what was be­ing done to deal with the traf­fic “bot­tle­neck” on Wright­son Road.

Phillips said a project is “on stream to widen Wright­son Road”.

“We did our traf­fic stud­ies and we first want to go with the east­bound lane start­ing at the (Hase­ly Craw­ford) Sta­di­um,” he said.

Phillips said the goal is to even­tu­al­ly have three lanes in both di­rec­tions of Wright­son Road.

The first por­tion of the project in­volves widen­ing the east­bound lane to three lanes from the sta­di­um to Sackville Street, Port-of-Spain.

In ad­di­tion to this Phillips said the loop made on the east­bound lane of Wright­son Road which takes mo­torists in­to Movi­eTowne is al­so un­der re­view.

The plan is pos­si­bly hav­ing a right turn from the sta­di­um in­to Movi­eTowne in­stead, but Phillips said dis­cus­sions are still to take place on this.

Dur­ing the JSC, Adande Pig­gott, a Traf­fic En­gi­neer at Min­istry, de­fend­ed the tim­ing of traf­fic lights in this coun­try.

“The av­er­age cit­i­zen be­lieves...they hate see­ing a traf­fic light turn four, five times be­fore you ac­tu­al­ly clear the in­ter­sec­tion,” Pig­gott said.

“The mod­el tells you short­er cy­cle lengths are bet­ter than longer cy­cle lengths,” Pig­gott said.

Pig­gott said the max­i­mum time that can be added to a traf­fic light con­troller is two min­utes, 55 sec­onds.

This time­frame is short­ened in T&T.