MY sincere condolence to the Aris family on the loss of Howard: a husband, father, grandfather, and a surrogate parent to many now-famous Jamaicans. He was to the last, a dedicated Jamaican and friend to so many persons across the seeming political divide.

The same may be said to the family of the late David Coore. David was the son of a family that became one with our family as far back as 1914 in Montego Bay. I called his parents aunt and uncle in that unique Jamaican way that friendships supersede bloodlines. He was a patriot with a brilliant mind.

These giants will be sadly missed, but memories shine through the temporary dark clouds of grief. I am privileged to have known both well.

Transportation

This area of our economic policy seeks to satisfy a very narrow group of persons whose earning power cannot be substantiated by their income tax payments, and therefore lends itself to manipulation and misrepresentation. Waivers to “farmers” for expensive SUVs masquerading as “farm equipment” cannot be substantiated by coffee exports that can’t even purchase four tyres. Perhaps the IMF is right, as our waivers do not seem to produce any meaningful growth.

Every morning in school time the “farmers’ wives and children” head off to good but expensive schools, and the farmers head to ’till the soil’ in New Kingston. I wonder who really smells the coffee. We don’t want to speak about these things as we are hoping to get a waiver ourselves and don’t want to blow our chance from a perfectly selfish perspective.

We don’t demand a decent bus service, and in so doing invite the entire population to seek major investments in the fastest depreciating, non-productive asset known to mankind: a motor vehicle. We lose 30 per cent in value just driving it off the lot after paying twice the price of that paid by the “rich Americans”. The poor want cars more than housing, and spend their savings on a reckless asset that they can’t live in and one regularly destroyed by illiterate drivers.

The affluent defeat the benefits to be derived from social interaction and “street smarts” and rear a bunch of maladjusted children who can’t live in Jamaica and who avoid reality through drugs and electronics. Those children live in an illusion and will not do as well as their parents have done, and wealth diminishes. How intelligent!

Perhaps it is great for governments that exist off import duties on vehicles and fuel, but it robs the people of funds for productive investment. In times that require growth in our economy we cannot pursue policies that intentionally remove investment from productive to non-productive assets. Then we borrow money to lend to the cash-starved producers at comparatively high interest rates.

The Government announced a policy to encourage a change to more efficient diesel engines. Good move. Then they completely ignore the fact that modern diesel engines cannot run efficiently on the dirty fuel produced by Petrojam, more than 20 times the sulphur content of Japan or Europe that are our best sources for good diesel vehicles of any size. It’s like running your new high-tech BMW on kerosene! Therefore the costs of maintenance are a burden to even those who have the original down payment.

Petrojam continues to be a major hurdle, as in order to significantly improve its quality it will require a massive capital injection that we do not have, and that will push the Government further into debt. It will not achieve a commercial viability if the Government reduced oil import taxes to realistic levels to lower electricity and transport costs to competitive levels.

So both hands are tied, and the loser is Jamaica. We tax the import of oil, we transform it inefficiently into a slush that destroys your vehicle, we tax the sales at gas stations, we tax the parts needed for repairs, and I will never agree that this is a sensible policy. This is more than “a tax”, this is an “attack”!

Quite realistically, I don’t think that people remember the long argument of engines being wrecked when motor vehicle production moved entirely away from leaded fuels. Perhaps we should say in retrospect, thank goodness for the “Shell waiver” that broke the back of the long debate that was really going nowhere, and finally delivered 87 and 90 octane unleaded gasoline. (High-end vehicle drivers should note that the current crop of $10-million vehicles really require 93 octane to run efficiently.) Please also remember the debacle when E-10 was introduced. Lots of lives in the fishing and boating industries could have been lost.

The total impact of inefficient transportation is a significant cost driver that defeats most elements of the improvements relevant to be competitive in any industry. From smoking buses polluting the environment to people frustrated by four-hour daily commutes within a radius of 20 miles, the anger management needed to control the hostility of the drivers of public passenger vehicles that cannot make enough trips per day in order to make a profit; no wonder we have an angry workforce.

The impact of poorly designed transportation systems cannot be properly evaluated, and I am really ready to try the train. I am also ready to try again to promote my 25-year-old plan to put monorails above the paved Kingston drainage system (after all, we already own the land). I also support the efforts to schedule cross-mountain routes for heavy haulage in one-way convoys at the time of least usage, for example Ewarton to Ocho Rios at 2:30 am to 4:00 am until the highway networks are working efficiently.

Again we can see that in order for policies to be successful there is a strong reason for an integration of the critical success factors. We need “joined-up” government that can make simultaneous changes across our current ministries and defeat their bureaucratic hegemony of power.

The speed limits on our roads and highways are still a stop-and-start factor because we allow building in close proximity to those highways. A drive from Montego Bay to Port Antonio has the stop-and-start factors that seem to be more about testing your brakes and acceleration, rather than enabling rapid transit! How stupid is that? Well, perhaps I may be the only person with an opinion, or maybe I care less about the dangers supposedly attached to the identification of irrationality in governance.

Transportation of goods can be efficient and can reduce costs significantly if approached intelligently. Transportation of people can increase the proximity of their homes in relation to work, and transform commuting into a non-stressful experience, as the employees of Jamaica Broilers now enjoy. We can distribute more offshoot industries and work from home in many cases and access the opportunities offered in the ICT industry, all by sensible planning and policy implementation.