KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

The Min­istry of Works and Trans­port has the full sup­port of the Ch­agua­nas Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce (CCIC) when it comes to its com­pre­hen­sive traf­fic al­le­vi­a­tion plan.

Last week, the min­istry re­vealed a three-tier traf­fic plan pro­vid­ing short, medi­um and long-term so­lu­tions.

Ac­cord­ing to cham­ber pres­i­dent Bal­dath Ma­haraj con­cep­tu­al­is­ing the plan for the Bor­ough of Ch­agua­nas was a joint ef­fort.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia at CCIC’s busi­ness mix­er held at Pas­sage to Asia Restau­rant, St Yves Street, Ch­agua­nas, on Fri­day, Ma­haraj said the cham­ber will con­tin­ue to give sug­ges­tions.

He said, “We have formed a team and we will con­sult di­rect­ly with the min­is­te­r­i­al team so that we will be able to give them our sug­ges­tions or in fact, from our mem­bers and busi­ness­men as to what we want to pri­ori­tised.

“The min­is­ter seemed very, very se­ri­ous and in fact they had al­ready start­ed work. He ad­vised that with­in the next two weeks those will go to ten­der,” he added.

Em­pha­sis­ing some of the sug­ges­tions, Ma­haraj said a round­about sit­u­at­ed ap­prox­i­mate­ly 100 to 150 feet west of the Med­ford gas sta­tion and an­oth­er round­about on the oth­er side of the Chase Vil­lage fly­over were two pro­pos­als to help with traf­fic con­ges­tion in the area.

He added that by the end of this year, he ex­pects con­struc­tion, in­clud­ing the widen­ing of roads and con­struct­ing round­abouts, to be at an ad­vanced stage.

While some cen­tral mo­torists be­lieve the plan would not work, the cham­ber is op­ti­mistic.

Asked if he be­lieved the plan would work, he said, “It will al­le­vi­ate the traf­fic sim­ply be­cause of the is­sue of cross­ing from one lane to the next. For ex­am­ple, if we leave PriceS­mart and we want to go across the fly­over head­ing in the west­er­ly di­rec­tion, a ve­hi­cle can­not go down the ramp by mak­ing a left turn.

“One of the pro­pos­als is to re­move those bar­ri­ers so they could make a left turn with­out cross­ing lanes. Like­wise, the south­bound lane, they could al­so do the very same thing com­ing from the next di­rec­tion, so that the is­sue re­al­ly is that ve­hi­cles are not go­ing to be cross­ing lanes.”

Ma­haraj said, “What that will do is to al­low the traf­fic to flow in and out of main­stream Ch­agua­nas on­to the high­way and that is where the bot­tle­neck is, so that we’ll have less traf­fic in­side Ch­agua­nas com­ing out. We’ll have less traf­fic around that round­about by PriceS­mart, the one go­ing in­to Lange Park.”