An­na-Lisa Paul

The Pub­lic Trans­port Ser­vice Cor­po­ra­tion (PTSC) is cur­rent­ly prepar­ing a draft note to take be­fore Cab­i­net for an in­crease in the cur­rent bus fares, which have not been in­creased since 1990.

The move is part of the PTSC's strate­gic plan to make it­self less de­pen­dent on the Trea­sury, gen­er­al man­ag­er Ronald Forde told a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee yes­ter­day.

He said while maxi-taxis and pri­vate taxis have in­creased their fares nu­mer­ous times over the past 26 years, the PTSC has not. He stressed the mea­sure was not in­tend­ed to place a fi­nan­cial bur­den on the pub­lic ac­cess­ing the bus ser­vice, but was rather "to make the tick­et more rea­son­able to re­alise some sort of rev­enue to off­set the sub­si­dies com­ing to the PTSC."

He ad­mit­ted they had not con­duct­ed any con­sul­ta­tion to mea­sure pub­lic re­ac­tion. But in giv­ing a com­par­i­son, he said the taxi fare from San Fer­nan­do was now $19 while the bus fare for the same route was $6 and the deluxe coach ser­vice was $10.

Com­pared to oth­er Cari­com ter­ri­to­ries, Forde said, while the se­nior cit­i­zens fare was re­cent­ly in­creased in Ja­maica, in T&T it was ac­cessed free once a cit­i­zen crossed 65. Adding that stu­dents in uni­form al­so got free trans­port, Forde said this mea­sure led to a short­fall in PTSC rev­enue of $14 mil­lion.

List­ing the chal­lenges the PTSC had en­coun­tered dur­ing the last cou­ple of years, Forde said the cur­rent bus fleet was old, there was a lack of avail­able parts and in­ven­to­ry and an in­ad­e­quate num­ber of bus­es.

Asked to rate the PTSC ser­vice at this time, Forde de­scribed it as "fair."

Aware it was not liv­ing up to the ex­pec­ta­tions of the com­mut­ing pub­lic, he said the av­er­age age of a bus fleet glob­al­ly was eight years while in T&T, the cur­rent fleet was now dou­ble this at 16 years.

"For us to get it right, we need the in­jec­tion of re­sources in­to PTSC and the bus ser­vice," Forde said.

He said they had been un­suc­cess­ful in se­cur­ing fund­ing through the PSIP since 2011 in or­der to ex­pand the GPS ser­vice.

On an­oth­er note, Forde said tech­nol­o­gy had played a part in help­ing of­fi­cials to im­me­di­ate­ly de­ter­mine cer­tain facts in Mon­day's fa­tal­i­ty in St. Au­gus­tine when a teacher was knocked down by a bus dri­ver.

Sad­dened at the trag­ic ac­ci­dent, Forde said tech­nol­o­gy al­lowed them to as­cer­tain the dri­ver "was way be­low the speed he was sup­posed to dri­ve at."

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