Ralph Ban­warie

Free­lance Con­trib­u­tor

Maxi taxi op­er­a­tors say the Gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion to open the Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route (PBR) to mo­torists dur­ing the on­go­ing trans­port dis­rup­tion has cre­at­ed se­vere con­ges­tion. Videos on so­cial me­dia yes­ter­day showed stand­still traf­fic near Arou­ca.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia, as the “rest and re­flect” ac­tion en­tered its sec­ond day yes­ter­day, Red Band Maxi Taxi Route Two As­so­ci­a­tion vice pres­i­dent Parasan Ram­per­sad said the move con­tributed to low lev­els of ser­vice among op­er­a­tors.

The Min­istry of Trans­port and Civ­il Avi­a­tion first opened the PBR to light mo­tor ve­hi­cles from 2 pm on Mon­day in re­sponse to trans­porta­tion chal­lenges caused by the maxi taxi strike.

In a re­lease yes­ter­day, the min­istry ex­tend­ed its open­ing for to­day as well, al­low­ing mo­torists to use the east­bound and west­bound lanes be­tween Ari­ma and Port-of-Spain.

Ram­per­sad said op­er­a­tors re­mained dis­sat­is­fied with the out­come of Mon­day’s meet­ing with the Trans­port Min­is­ter and felt their con­cerns had not been ad­e­quate­ly ad­dressed.

He said op­er­a­tors were pre­pared to ab­sorb the fi­nan­cial im­pact of the ac­tion, not­ing that many dri­vers had made pro­vi­sions for dif­fi­cult pe­ri­ods with­out in­come.

As the ac­tion en­ters a third day to­day, op­er­a­tors are ex­pect­ed to de­cide whether to con­tin­ue the protest or re­sume nor­mal ser­vice.