A country of roads and no direction

Oct 17, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – For years now, our country has been building roads as though the horizon itself could be paved into submission. New highways sprout like vines after rain, four-lane corridors slicing through the cane fields, roundabouts blooming where once stood trees. Yet the problem of traffic grows worse, not better.

David Granger, the former President of Guyana, more than a decade ago, saw the shape of this trap. His view was simple, almost quaint now in its clarity: the solution to traffic is not more roads but fewer cars. His Minister of Finance reminded us of this yesterday morning on a podcast.

Granger understood that infrastructure must not chase demand; it must anticipate and guide it. He spoke of mass transport, of systems that move people. But his was a voice from another time.

Today, the philosophy of our public works appears to be guided less by reason than by reaction. Traffic thickens, and we build. Congestion returns, and we build again. Each new highway is hailed as salvation until the first wave of vehicles descends upon it. Then it becomes what every other road becomes: a strip of frustration, cluttered with vehicles and lined with warehouses and roadside commerce that follow the scent of opportunity.

Consider the Schoonord Road. It might have been the spine of a new kind of thinking — a corridor for light rail, gliding from the old Demerara Harbour Bridge to Parfaite Harmonie to Parika, carrying thousands in comfort and quiet. The lands alongside the Heroes Highway could have been reserved for a similar purpose, a right-of-way for the future. But those lands, like so many others, have been given away for commercial and industrial development, the kind that generates quick returns but long regrets. Instead of a light rail line, we have warehouses.

A more imaginative plan might have looked different. Commuters from the West Bank and West Coast could have parked their vehicles at a central lot near the old Harbour Bridge — the Joe Vieira Park, perhaps — and boarded large shuttle buses, modern “Go-Buses” capable of carrying a hundred passengers apiece. These buses could have been granted priority lanes along the East Bank, moving swiftly past the crawl of private cars, ferrying workers into Georgetown with efficiency. It would have taken thousands of vehicles off the road, eased congestion, and — most importantly — demonstrated that collective transport is not a punishment for those who cannot afford cars, but a privilege of those who value time and sanity.

This idea is not new. Urban planners call it a Park and Ride system, and it has been used to tame traffic in cities far busier than ours. But here, the notion of shared transport has never quite captured the political imagination. Perhaps it is because the motorcar, in our society, has become more than a means of travel. It is a status symbol, a declaration of arrival. To ask people to leave their vehicles behind is to ask them to abandon a little of their pride. And so, we build roads to keep up with our ambitions.

During the school vacation, something remarkable happens: the traffic eases. It is a small but telling miracle, one that reveals how deeply the transport of schoolchildren has become entangled in the larger traffic malaise. The roads are not clogged merely with workers but with parents delivering their children to schools that lie miles away from home. Each morning, thousands of cars perform the same ballet — pick up, drop off, and rejoin the jam.

If we wished to begin solving the problem, we might start here. Let the government introduce school buses for the major institutions of Georgetown — Queen’s College, Bishops’, St. Stanislaus, St. Rose’s, and St. Joseph’s. Each school could have three dedicated routes: East Coast, East Bank, and West Coast. Parents would be spared the daily drive, and the roads would be spared thousands of additional vehicles. It would not solve everything, but it would prove that solutions need not always come wrapped in concrete and asphalt.

But there is also another kind of traffic, but no less destructive: the procession of sand trucks along the East Bank Public Road. These heavy vehicles lumber along the same arteries that commuters use.

Why not, then, separate them entirely from the civilian road network? Let there be a heavy-rail system, similar to the one that carries bauxite from the mines. Deep within the East Bank, we might establish vast sand depots, far from residential areas and waterways. The sand could be transported there by rail, and from these depots, trucks could distribute it to Georgetown, the East Coast, and West Demerara. It would be an investment not only in infrastructure but in sanity.

But this too, requires foresight — the rarest commodity in public life. It means looking beyond the next election and asking what kind of country we wish to inhabit twenty years from now.

The flaw in our current strategy is that it mistakes the symptom for the disease. Traffic is not the problem; it is the manifestation of deeper problems: poor planning, unchecked sprawl, the absence of reliable public transport, and a cultural attachment to private mobility. To treat traffic by building more roads is like treating obesity by loosening the belt.

To escape this cycle, Guyana needs a new approach, one that begins not with the car but with the citizen. The goal should not be to make it easier for vehicles to move, but to make it easier for people to move without cars.

One man had the solution but not the resources at the time. And we voted him out.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• direction, New highways, Peeping Tom, roads

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