MONTEGO BAY, St James — In less than a month, the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) has repaired about 300 street lights on Montego Bay’s Elegant Corridor which is fast earning a reputation as a crash hot spot.

The work started in late December after Cabinet approved a long-awaited transfer, to the JPS, of responsibility for street lights on a number of major thoroughfares. Oversight initially rested with the National Works Agency (NWA).

“Cabinet recently approved a framework for the phased handing over of these street lights to JPS over a three-year period. The contract to facilitate the handing over is being worked on,” JPS Director of Corporate Communications Winsome Callum told the Jamaica Observer earlier this week.

Speaking specifically to the Elegant Corridor she said “very minimal” repairs were “done by JPS in good faith to ensure that there was some lighting of the corridor for the Christmas season”. Since then, work has continued even though the lights still remain the responsibility of the NWA, Callum said.

When the handover is completed it is expected that close to 2,000 lights will be transferred to the JPS in the parishes of St James, Kingston, and St Andrew. These include sections of Hope Road, Old Hope Road, Trafalgar Road, Washington Boulevard, Harbour View to Rockfort, Michael Manley Boulevard and the Bogue Road in St James.

There have long been calls for repairs to be made to malfunctioning lights that have left long stretches of the heavily-trafficked Elegant Corridor — which runs from Lilliput to Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay — in darkness. Last June, Minister of Tourism Edmund Bartlett said he was distressed at the inadequacy of illumination on the road and the slow pace at which the problem was being addressed. He said, then, that money had been provided through the Tourism Enhancement Fund to the NWA to address the issue.