Bus parks and an embankment

Dec 19, 2019 Editorial

It is any port for a storm, as the old saying goes. There is a serious limitation when that is contemplated, for there are few – very few – ports in Georgetown that offers the ease of a welcoming, much needed harbour that rescues from the daily traffic storms and turbulences. To their credit, the planners and thinkers at the Guyana Police Force scouted around and extracted just such a port out of seemingly nothing: the Lamaha Street railway embankment as space for a bus park.
But is it right for what is involved, and could it work?
This is not even a question of what is most appropriate, since that is sure to encounter one handicap after another and, the environment be surveyed, the options are few to nonexistent. Or does this simply lateral the problem from one tight space in the city (Stabroek) to another (Kingston/Cummingsburg)?
For starters, the former railway embankment represents that scarcest of commodities in the capital city – an open plot of land, long enough and opportunistic enough, to stir thoughts of an area of relief from the heavily congested and sharply contested spaces around the Stabroek square. Without much – more accurately, no detail – to work with, this appears to have some pluses and its share of negatives.
The first plus, to express the obvious, is that the terminals around the market get some degree of ease. That sprawling area of riverfront, fire station, speedboats, small business vendors, a liquor establishment of some legend, and unending throngs of commuters and shoppers should (should) experience a slight decline in foot traffic, and some noticeable drop in vehicular presence, especially buses.
The East Coast and Berbice bus parks make sense to consider moving, since the more central hub of the railway embankment can be the ending and starting points for those travelers, and from which to proceed along the different spokes to various parts of Georgetown for business and the host of other matters requiring attention.
The same could be envisioned for those buses that ply the intra Georgetown city routes, such as Kitty and Campbellville while, on the other hand, it may not be the most constructive thinking to move the Timehri, Linden, and East Bank, West Demerara buses away from around Stabroek.
Now, while the Stabroek area is largely uninhabited by residences, and is in a quasi-commercial zone, the immediate northern and southern surroundings of the railway embankment is more of homes and less of anything else. In fact, there are four hospitals, with their own traffic flows of vehicles and people, within a stone throw, which only compound what has to stand as a negative. Thus, the essence of the question and concern is this: is an already very tight situation transferred to a point that may be unable to accommodate it?
In addition, around Stabroek, there are the following entry and exit points: Avenue of the Republic, Hadfield Street, and Croal Street to name a couple. To and from the embankment, there is Lamaha Street and Camp Street, both of which are screamingly overpopulated at most hours. Those two streets identified can become nightmarish in the extended bottlenecks and tensions created.
Further, there are several huge public schools (private ones, too), with several thousands of children, who are never among the most disciplined of pedestrians, that could add to a serious, perhaps untenable, scenario. In sum, there is an existing crowd and very crowded thoroughfare in existence in an extremely limited area of operation. To heap additional layers of people and vehicles in that small space could snarl it into unending, if not insoluble, knots.
Still further, there is a culture at work in this country that should neither be ignored nor dismissed. It is that wherever those buses go, the platoons of touts and vendors are sure to follow, which place the implications of their aggregate presence in the centre of the table.
Does the tighter neighbourhood of the railway embankment provide the cover and opportunity for other criminal operators to target residences and schoolchildren with unwanted attention and goods? Additional scarce police resources would have to be deployed.
The GPF stated that bridges would be built, some different ones must be built with the communities living around there.

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