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Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Traffic flow changes lead to chaos

by

Peter Christopher
2226 days ago
20190625
Ongoing work at the Curepe highway intersection.

Ongoing work at the Curepe highway intersection.

Nicole Drayton

The first full day of traf­fic changes im­ple­ment­ed for the con­struc­tion of the Curepe In­ter­change saw mas­sive traf­fic pile­ups along the South­ern Main Road.

Ve­hi­cles head­ing south along the main road were caught in bot­tle­necks from the Val­sayn in­ter­sec­tion short­ly be­fore noon.

"(It's) Ter­ri­ble, ter­ri­ble, be­fore this ramp here we nev­er used to have this traf­fic con­ges­tion. Com­ing out of Curepe you used to have four lanes to ex­it now you on­ly have one lane to ex­it. The four lanes used to be one go­ing, two go­ing straight and one go­ing right. We don't have that. Every­body go­ing in one di­rec­tion so the traf­fic is ter­ri­ble," said a Maxi Taxi dri­ver, who on­ly gave his name as Ger­ry.

"It hard for us as maxi dri­vers and taxi dri­vers would have the same con­cern," he said.

Pres­i­dent of the Route 3 Maxi Taxi As­so­ci­a­tion Julien St George said the ad­just­ment was par­tic­u­lar­ly hard on the maxi dri­vers, as they had no oth­er ex­it which would keep them on their route.

"What hap­pen is that the ac­com­mo­da­tion that they made head­ed south, it's a lit­tle bit too nar­row to ac­com­mo­date the load, the bulk of the traf­fic. When you head­ed north, I see that they mak­ing a merge lane for ve­hi­cles that head­ing west, that ap­par­ent­ly will (al­low ve­hi­cles) to merge and that will take away a lot of traf­fic from ve­hi­cles that cross­ing the Churchill Roo­sevelt head­ing north but head­ing south it a lit­tle bit tight," said St George, "We hav­ing traf­fic start­ing from as far as Knowles Street straight down to the Churchill Roo­sevelt. We ac­cus­tomed to hav­ing traf­fic on that stretch but not to that ex­tent."

The dri­vers added the elon­gat­ed pe­ri­od of traf­fic was al­so a con­cern.

"It hav­ing traf­fic on hours that didn't usu­al­ly (have traf­fic). We wasn't ac­cus­tomed to hav­ing traf­fic at (those) hours. Usu­al­ly, in the morn­ing pe­ri­od, traf­fic would have died down say 9 o'clock and thing. Right now the traf­fic run­ning straight up to half-past 11," said St George who said there was a sim­i­lar re­cur­rence of the traf­fic af­ter lunch.

Ch­agua­nas and San Fer­nan­do Taxi dri­vers al­so com­plained about the back­up.

St. George ex­plained that the three maxi taxi as­so­ci­a­tions had met with the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port of­fi­cials be­fore to dis­cuss the changes and a sug­ges­tion was made that the taxi dri­vers be al­lowed tem­po­rary ac­cess to the bus route from Farm Road to Mt Hope In­ter­sec­tion.

St. George said while that would re­duce the num­ber of ve­hi­cles on the South­ern Main Road, the maxi dri­vers were still at the mer­cy of changes.

"They have a way out, but we don't have a way out," said St. George, who called for a sim­i­lar merge lane to be in­tro­duced for ve­hi­cles head­ed south to al­le­vi­ate the back­up.

The traf­fic changes came in­to ef­fect at 7 pm on Mon­day.


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