Gail Alexan­der

A re­port­ed pro­pos­al for ca­ble cars to take peo­ple up to Fort Pic­ton in Laven­tille is on­ly an idea and is not on the ta­ble for con­sid­er­a­tion or ap­proval, Plan­ning Min­is­ter Bhoe Tewarie said in Par­lia­ment on Fri­day.Re­ply­ing on an Op­po­si­tion ques­tion, Tewarie said he had on­ly spo­ken about the idea re­cent­ly and it made the head­lines.

Tewarie said the idea came from an IDB-sup­port­ed plan for such fa­cil­i­ties in cer­tain parts of the hemi­sphere af­ter an IDB-fund­ed vist to T&T, by Swiss stu­dents, who did a study on the is­sue. UWI and UTT stu­dents were al­so in­volved.It was pro­posed that ca­ble cars could fer­ry lo­cal and for­eign vis­i­tors as well as res­i­dents be­tween those hilly parts of Laven­tille near Fort Pic­ton and City Gate. The pro­pos­al was re­ceived and ac­cept­ed for fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion to im­prove ac­cess to the her­itage site.

To date the IDB has con­tract­ed a fea­si­bil­i­ty study by a con­sul­tant and draft terms of ref­er­ence for a pro­pos­al are be­ing re­viewed by a lo­cal tech­ni­cal team.But, he said, "To date no spe­cif­ic ca­ble car pro­jec­tions are on the ta­ble for con­sid­er­a­tion nor for ap­proval by gov­ern­ment."

Af­ter ex­press­ing an in­ter­est in such a sys­tem, fi­nan­cial, eco­nom­ic and tech­ni­cal stud­ies are to be done. Tewarie said as a re­sult there is no es­ti­mat­ed date for the start of in­fra­struc­tur­al work un­til stud­ies are done and a de­ci­sion is made whether or not to pur­sue im­ple­ment­ing the sys­tem.