“You can’t drop him off before 7:00 am; after 7:45 am he will be marked late.”

This is the window when most children have to get to school in Jamaica from pre-K through high school. That’s unless your child is on a public shift system or goes to a private school, sometimes giving them a later start.

So imagine a parent, taxi driver, or bus driver trying to get a child to school on time in the mornings and then people trying to get work on time for 8:00 am or 8:30 am just in Kingston. The reality on the roads in the morning is bumper-to-bumper traffic across the city. It feels like a breathless rush, adrenaline pumping, indisciplined driving, and people often feel tired before they even start their day of activities.

There are also other times for picking up the children, dropping them off, returning to work, and leaving work for home.

Not only are our people not getting enough rest because they have to wake up before the crack of dawn, but they cannot finish most of their work because “they must catch the 5 0’clock bus to get back to St Catherine”.

From my experience, if I leave Parliament at 5:00 pm, it will take me two and a half hours from downtown Kingston to reach home. No, I don’t have a siren to get me through traffic. I resent that public officials use this privilege to get through traffic.

But if I had young children to drop off at school, then pick up from school to drop off at activities, then pick up from activities, and then take home and do homework with, I can honestly say that I am not sure how I would cope with that daily. Averaging it out would mean that the preparation to get on our roads in the mornings and get off them in the evenings could amount to anywhere between five and six hours each weekday.

This is madness!

How can this make for a productive nation when so much of our time is spent preparing for traffic on the roads and spending time in it?

Once, a term such as ‘peak hour’ traffic existed in Kingston, referring to a one-hour periods during the day when the road system was at its busiest. Typically, peak hours are when people are trying to get to work, school, or home from work.

As a teenager, I knew that depending on where you lived you could leave your house at a particular time and arrive at your destination on time. When I was in high school my father used to take me to school daily. We lived in Orange Grove in Stony Hill. We would leave at 7:00 am and arrive at The Queen’s School by 7:30 am at the latest. Grant you, this was over three decades ago.

Now, there are more cars than roads to manage them, and it seems that every hour of the day in Kingston is peak hour, and there is no actual opportunity to beat the traffic.

What used to take a half hour to 45 minutes is now taking two hours and “wi nuh reach Christmas yet!”

Driving in Kingston now is frustrating, burdensome, and tiresome. Worse, with the amount of rain, the roads are a minefield with potholes, and I feel sorry for the pedestrians and others who rely on public transport as the absent-minded drivers pass them by and splash them at bus stops and sidewalks.

Yet we continue importing more cars. In 2022, Jamaica imported more than $47 billion worth of cars into our marketplace without building more roads to accommodate them. This is an entirely anti-developmental approach to making our nation more productive. Furthermore, because we have never implemented efficient, equitable, and diverse public transport, school bus, or ‘park and ride’ systems in our city centres, this has led to every family member of a household most times buying a car.

Kingston cannot continue with this kind of traffic congestion.

One solution would be to establish a proper ferry system with roll-on, roll-off (RORO) ferries from Portmore to downtown Kingston. A scheduled ‘park and ride’ system would support the ferry system, allowing people to park their cars at secure lots and travel in comfortable shuttles for work and school in the downtown, Cross Roads, Half-Way-Tree, Constant Spring, and Hope Road areas.

The Government could subsidise this approach and charge a fee equivalent to a bus fare to use the ferry and the park and ride.

Until a perimeter highway is designed and built around Kingston, we have to implement flexible work and school start times. However, this is easier said than done, and most employers are already accustomed to doing things in a certain way.

Perhaps a carpooling system for households on certain days would reduce the number of cars on the roads.

To be fair, many Jamaicans cannot afford a car and only use taxis from point A to point B in the Corporate Area. Taxi drivers are everywhere and are essential in our society despite some of their driving habits. Like New York, where public taxis must be yellow and are streamlined and regulated, we must begin this same process for vehicles licensed as public taxis to be a different colour with visible identification and registration for their designated routes. It provides for better passenger security, and more car owners would be inclined to park their cars and use them around the city.

Jamaica has made significant progress with our highways to rural areas. Kingsley Thomas must be credited with envisioning and implementing the mechanisms for getting them done back in the 1990s under the P J Patterson-led Administration.

Yet, where are our urban planners now?

Where is the vision for the Kingston metropolitan area?

It’s time we evaluated how many productivity hours we lose simply by spending time in traffic and paying the increased cost of travel.

Some moments show similar duration times for some locations, especially if we were even to walk there based on the congestion.

Not all of us can have sirens that part the traffic, but we must be mindful that this is now the depressing reality of our daily commute.

Lisa Hanna is Member of Parliament for St Ann South Eastern, People’s National Party spokesperson on foreign affairs and foreign trade, and a former Cabinet member.

Lisa Hanna