THE public transportation system is to be liberalised as of June 3, the Transport Authority said in a release yesterday.

Transport Minister Montague had announced in February that the liberalisation process would commence in May 2019; however, there was a delay because of the large volume of applications for renewals being processed by the Transport Authority.

“Accordingly, in order to ensure that the processing of renewal applications is completed, prior to the acceptance of new applications, the decision was taken to commence accepting new applications on June 3, 2019. Under the liberalised system, the Transport Authority will resume the acceptance of new applications for all categories of road licences islandwide, except for hackney carriages in the Kingston Metropolitan Transport Region.

This will result in the opening of 1, 251 routes across the island to include 989 route taxi and 262 rural stage carriage routes.

The Transport Authority said all new road licence applications must be accompanied by the stipulated letter from an approved Electronic Fleet Management System (EFMS) provider providing confirmation of the installation of the EFMS device in keeping with the April 1, 2019 implementation of that system.

Additionally, in June 2019, the authority will roll out its recently designed Regional Licence Approval (RLA) process, geared at decentralising and automating the processing of road licence applications. It is anticipated that the RLA process will significantly reduce the turnaround time for new applications from 21 working days to 10 working days.

Minister Montague, at the same time, has asked unlicensed transport operators to take advantage of this opportunity to become compliant with the law as there will be a zero-tolerance approach to unlicensed operations.