Gail Alexan­der

Just over half the pop­u­la­tion’s us­ing pub­lic trans­port– bus­es, maxi taxis and con­ven­tion­al “H” taxis, ac­cord­ing to lat­est sta­tis­tics.

And Gov­ern­ment is ob­tain­ing 300 more bus­es, push­ing to im­prove PTSC since its pre­vi­ous mass tran­sit sys­tem plan has been put on hold due to the cost.

Work Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan in­di­cat­ed this in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day. He was re­ply­ing to In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Paul Richards’ queries.

Sinanan said sta­tis­tics at Feb­ru­ary 15, 2021 showed the av­er­age num­ber of peo­ple who use pub­lic trans­port on a dai­ly and week­ly ba­sis is es­ti­mat­ed to be 728,00 - about 56 per­cent of T&T’s pop­u­la­tion .

Most re­cent sta­tis­tics show on av­er­age 1.55 per cent of the com­mut­ing pub­lic is served by PTSC dai­ly .

Over the past five years, trends in terms of the per­cent­age of com­muters us­ing PTSC ranged from 6.7 mil­lion peo­ple and dai­ly rid­er­ship of 25,000 in 2015/16 to 2 mil­lion and dai­ly rid­er­ship of 11,299 in 2019/2020. Sinanan not­ed the lat­ter was the year COVID-19 hit.

High­est fig­ure was in 2016/2017 with 7.5 mil­lion peo­ple and dai­ly rid­er­ship of 28,777 .

Re­cent sur­veys in­di­cat­ed a”lot more peo­ple” would use PTSC how­ev­er the cor­po­ra­tion has chal­lenges such as its fleet caus­ing PTSC to op­er­ate on­ly half of its routes .

Three hun­dred more bus­es are be­ing ob­tained to bring the fleet up to 500 when it’s ex­pect­ed rid­er­ship will in­crease .

Sinanan said Gov­ern­ment aims on PTSC be­ing the num­ber one trans­porta­tion mode and get­ting rid­er­ship up to about 15 per cent.

Sinanan said at Feb­ru­ary 15, 2021 there were 6,739 reg­is­tered maxi taxis in op­er­a­tion – 17 per cent for work and 18 per cent for school .

Al­so, there are 32, 666 ‘H’ taxis com­pris­ing 6, 739 maxi taxis and 25, 927 con­ven­tion­al taxis.

Min­is­ter: 12, 509 ex­emp­tions up to Feb­ru­ary

The to­tal num­ber of peo­ple who re­ceived ex­emp­tions to en­ter T&T up to Feb­ru­ary 9, is 12,509, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young said .

Re­ply­ing to In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Paul Richards, he said the ma­jor­i­ty in­volves cit­i­zens

Young said ex­act num­bers are cur­rent­ly be­ing ver­i­fied . At June 2020, per­ma­nent res­i­dents were grant­ed ex­emp­tions to re­turn.

Al­so, peo­ple who ap­plied for per­ma­nent res­i­den­cy and have spous­es/con­nec­tions to cit­i­zens have been grant­ed ap­proval.

On an­oth­er query by UNC’s Mark on long over­due NIB re­ports of 2019 and 2020, Fi­nance’s Colm Im­bert said the re­ports are un­der re­view and will be tabled in Par­lia­ment short­ly .

This was since the re­ports sent to the Fi­nance Min­istry con­tained pol­i­cy mat­ters out­side of NIB’s purview and which are gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy mat­ters.

This con­cerns reg­is­tra­tion of Venezue­lan mi­grants for na­tion­al in­sur­ance and reg­is­tra­tion of self em­ployed peo­ple. These are two mat­ters on which there is no de­fin­i­tive gov­ern­ment de­ci­sion - oth­er than, at this point - that the reg­is­tra­tion of mi­grants and self em­ployed isn’t per­mit­ted.

But the re­ports con­tained pol­i­cy on these two mat­ters. As a re­sult a Cab­i­net sub-com­mit­tee is re­view­ing the re­port to see where NIB de­vi­at­ed from gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy.

The re­view is al­so so that ap­pro­pri­ate arrange­ments can be made. It’s ex­pect­ed that in a month that ex­er­cise will be com­plet­ed. Among mat­ters Im­bert has been tak­ing a lot of flack for from the Op­po­si­tion, is the non-pre­sen­ta­tion of the re­ports.