We share the passion evident in Mr Mikael Phillips’s upbraiding of the Government’s management of the public transport system, particularly as it relates to the Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC).

Mr Phillips, the Opposition spokesman on transport, correctly stated in his contribution to the 2023/24 Sectoral Debate in Parliament on Tuesday that “Bad policy, political interference, and lack of vision are killing Jamaica’s transport sector, and the bad old days of the 1980s are back with us.”

We agree with his argument that, “Public transport must have sustainability, values, benefits, and capacity,” therefore a new direction is badly needed to take the sector forward so as to achieve global standards.

He also promised that a new People’s National Party Government will overhaul the problem-plagued and cash-starved JUTC. But that is a song we have heard before from Opposition politicians. It’s a vow that is not worth the air time or column inches it has been given, because once the politicians get elected to office that vow is conveniently vacated on the altar of political expedience.

Readers with a knowledge of our history will recall that in the late 1990s the then Government established the JUTC in an effort to restore order to public transportation as it recognised the damage that had been done in the decade before.

However, the Government started stacking the JUTC with its supporters while subfranchising routes to independent players – a system that eventually morphed into the ramshackle operation we see now with unruly elements who pose a danger to commuters, motorists and pedestrians.

That imbecility has been maintained by successive governments and so we have today a State-owned bus company that continues to limp, unable to provide a proper and efficient service to our citizens.

In March this year the JUTC projected net loss of $7 billion in the next fiscal year.

The company also told us that it plans to increase its fleet of buses by 50 in the new fiscal year, which began on April 1, and that should help it increase passenger numbers in the next fiscal year by 72 per cent to 31 million, at an average of 85,000 passengers per day.

To achieve that the company intends to have an average of 288 buses in service each day.

But even with those projections we remain unconvinced that the JUTC can be efficiently run using the formula utilised by successive governments.

We reiterate that the Government needs to seek assistance from individuals who are skilled at running businesses to oversee the operations of the JUTC.

Following that, the Administration needs to take the hard decision of ridding the company of political hacks who are there collecting public money without exchange for skilled labour.

Additionally, we restate our position that what is needed is the will to organise, maintain, and grow a structured public transportation system in keeping with the population, along with the commercial and residential expansion across the country.

We acknowledge that such an operation is not inexpensive. However, many nations, among them some of the richest, subsidise public transportation, as doing so provides benefits of those governments, their people and investors. Those governments treat such subsidies as strategic investments that generate huge social, economic and environmental returns.