A new north­bound lane of the Solomon Ho­choy High­way be­tween Ch­agua­nas and Chase Vil­lage should be opened by Wednes­day, says Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Ro­han Sinanan.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Sinanan said the south­bound sec­tion has al­ready been opened. The project start­ed in Jan­u­ary 2024 and took just over a year to com­plete. Sinanan stat­ed that safe­ty con­cerns, in­clud­ing the paint­ing of the white lines on the north­bound sec­tion, must be ad­dressed be­fore the sec­tion is opened.

He said, “The work on the high­way, the paving, has been com­plet­ed; what they are do­ing now is ad­dress­ing the safe­ty is­sues.”

Sinanan said the ex­pan­sion of the high­way is an on­go­ing project that would see three lanes head­ing to San Fer­nan­do. The Works Min­is­ter said the vol­ume of traf­fic be­tween Port-of-Spain and San Fer­nan­do re­quires more than two lanes dur­ing peak hours.

“We can’t do all at the same time; we have to do it in phas­es.”

He said the three lanes from Port-of-Spain to Mau­si­ca would al­so be ex­pand­ed to the O’Meara traf­fic lights as part of the high­way build-out pro­gramme to Ari­ma. Sinanan said there are a lot of ac­tiv­i­ties tak­ing place be­fore Dr Kei­th Row­ley demits of­fice, in­clud­ing the open­ing of the Cen­tral Block of the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal to­mor­row and a “show­ing” of the air­port in To­ba­go. How­ev­er, Sinanan said there was no planned open­ing for the ex­ten­sion of the high­way.–Shas­tri Boodan