PORTMORE commuters continue to face the issue of inadequate public transportation as the Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC) is still struggling to meet the load demand, rolling out just 65 per cent of the units which the municipality requires to meet its travelling needs.

Mayor of Portmore Leon Thomas says the issue needs to be given urgent attention to ease the long-standing burden on the residents, the vast majority of whom must travel daily into the capital for their livelihoods.

Thomas told the Jamaica Observer on the weekend that residents have been trying to get to Kingston and back during peak hours. have been suffering over the years.

“The transportation system in Portmore is very bad because you have a number of residents complaining to the municipality and also to councillors that there is no bus to transport them from Portmore to Kingston and from Kingston to Portmore. The Government needs to do something quickly to deal with the situation. The majority of the people live in Portmore but work in Kingston, so they need to look at either the rail system from Gregory Park into Kingston, or the Ferry system to run by Port Henderson to have some shuttle service done to solve the situation,” he said.

However, major rehabilitation would be needed to get the rail service between Kingston and Portmore operational.

With the municipality on the cusp of taking on the status of being the country’s 15th parish, public amenities and services such as transportation are one of the numerous concerns which were raised during Parliamentary discussions to determine whether it was ready to be named a parish. Parliament passed a motion in February approving parish status.Furthermore, Thomas said the conditions which commuters travel in, especially in adverse weather, are unacceptable, added to the problem of the unreliable bus service. “The current buses that they have now, when rain fall the people are wetting up inside of them. They’re not reliable; often times they break down on the road. Having a municipality like Portmore where the majority of the people go into Kingston, that is something that needs the urgent attention of the Government,” he stated.

At a meeting last week, JUTC’s Managing Director Paul Abrahams told the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee “there is no shortage of commuters in Portmore, there is a shortage of buses in Portmore”.

He said the municipality needs at least an optimal 130 units to move the large volume of commuters between Kingston and Portmore, but that currently the JUTC only has 85 buses operating the route.

“One of the challenges with Portmore is that [it’s] a dormitory, so you’re moving quite a mass of people in the morning and bringing them from Kingston also, so where we would move that dormitory between 5:30 or to 8 o’clock you have two and a half hours to move a lot of persons. If you notice, the Portmore buses run empty virtually back and forth during the day so the operation in Portmore basically comes down to morning and evening peak — so that is where you need buses.

“It is such a confined movement of persons in a short period that you need those 130 buses in the morning to satisfy that movement. So if you’re short of several buses, you now run into major delays and challenges because it’s a lot of people in two hours,” he outlined.

Abrahams said even with the franchise routes, there still isn’t enough seating capacity to move the volume of commuters.

“Portmore just seems to keep growing and growing. The truth is that you need something like a rail system or you need something that can move a lot of people in a short window. Running 130 buses is not an easy thing to do back and forth in a very short time,” he said.

He explained that in some instances, buses are not to make more than one trip cycle (back and forth) due to traffic congestion.

“If you look at Spanish Town and Boulevard for example, they’re just sitting in traffic because they can’t get to the lay by to come back to Half-Way-Tree,” he said.The JUTC is expecting 50 new buses in 2023, five of them the long-proposed electric units.