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The road to better buses

EditorialThe road to better buses

The ideal for the transportation industry would be for top-of-the-line buses to be on the road serving commuters from Punta Gorda to Consejo and Sarteneja, from Belize City to Benque Viejo del Carmen, daily, from four in the morning until ten at night. There would be sufficient buses on the road so that every commuter gets a seat; buses would be punctual, and the average commuter wouldn’t be unduly stressed to pay for the trip. Our present transportation industry is performing reasonably well, except in one area, where its grade is far from satisfactory.

The Minister of Youth, Sports, and Transport, Hon. Rodwell Ferguson, has stated that there are too many buses on our highways. Too many buses on the highways is bad for the earnings of bus owners, but good for commuters who, from end to end of the country, are fairly certain they can catch a bus to wherever they are going, though during rush hours not everyone can get a seat. Bus fares are high in a country where the minimum wage is $3.30 per hour, but, because of the high cost of transportation, it’s hard to see fares being reduced without direct subsidies from government. It is in the area of quality that the service is failing badly. Our bus fleet, the majority of which is made up of school buses which were bought secondhand in the US, is on its last wheels.

In 2014, Chief Transport Officer, Mr. Crispin Jeffries, told Amandala that 50,000-60,000 people commute across Belize each day, and that the public transport system “moves at least 4.5 million individuals annually.” It’s precious cargo, transporting thousands of Belizeans and visitors daily, and it is reckless to do so in buses that aren’t roadworthy. It is also unhealthy to travel on substandard buses. There are hospital bills to pay, medicines to buy, and downtime when commuters get wet by rain when traveling in buses with windows that don’t lock properly. Many commuters travel 50, 100, 150 miles daily to and from their workplace and, apart from all that traveling being a drag on their energy levels, there is the extra physical toll from sitting on seats with weak springs and worn padding, in compressed spaces, and standing in aisles.

KREM News says the minister recently stated that bus operators had been given enough time to improve their fleets, and he reaffirmed that major improvement must come by December this year. Commuters would welcome traveling in more comfortable buses. If there were better buses on the highways, and taxi operators in the cities and towns had more fuel-efficient cars so they could reduce the price of a drop, many commuters would park their SUVs/cars/pickups and take the buses. The GOB would suffer a loss of revenues, from fuel taxes, but that’s another story.

The story at hand is about better buses, and bus operators say they would be able to afford those if the Ministry of Transport gave them 10-year contracts for the routes they service, instead of the present 2-year contracts, which aren’t one-fifth of the life of a new bus. They also want the GOB to remove the import duty on buses, improve their access to funding, and stop giving special treatment to Floralia, a new operator that has introduced buses of superior quality.

It is only recently that the industry has begun running at full capacity again, and Floralia entered its luxury buses at a time when existing operators were at their lowest. It could be argued that Belize owes operators who kept their buses on the road during the pandemic, when their profits were next to nil. However, withholding their services wasn’t a real option. If they had done so, they would have lost their slots to entrepreneurs with deeper pockets, business folk that were ready to service the routes until the country got back to normal.

This is not the first attempt by a PUP government to improve public transportation. The first attempt, by its 1998-2003 government, was a fiasco. That government tried to hand the entire industry to a single company, but it wasn’t smooth sailing for the operators, David and Tony Novelo, and the business collapsed into receivership. Without going into too many details, the GOB didn’t deliver on a promise to the Novelos, to keep other bus lines off the road, and the Novelos apparently underestimated the cost of upgrading the bus fleet and terminals, and didn’t realize how much the “eighth wonder of the world”, interest rates on a 30-million dollar loan it received from the DFC, would bite into their profits.

A subsequent UDP government did an about turn, and broke the industry into small blocks. How we ended up in a situation with so many “expired” buses on the road requires extensive research, but it is certain that the hard-to-understand 2-year contracts have a share in the failure. The division of the blocks, how the prized runs (peak time), and the “social runs” (periods when there are few commuters), were given out to operators, is also to be considered. And so are fares. Bus operators say they need an increase. The GOB knows the majority of commuters just can’t pay more.

Floralia-type buses are not exactly the ideal for Belize. Like the extremely expensive Belize City Center, these buses are 100% dependent on air conditioning to keep passengers cool. The influenza bug has never found a better environment to spread its germs than an air-conditioned space.

The bus fleet has to be upgraded, urgently. Existing bus owners are broke, unable to deliver within the present structure. Floralia appears to be flush with cash, and its owner, or representative, is actively pushing for more routes. Its game plan seems to have been taken straight from the playbook of Asian Belizeans in the grocery business. They built huge structures, stocked them with everything, and watched small Roots Belizean businesses disappear. There are commuters who will be loyal to the operators that have been transporting them year after year, but if Floralia or any operator floods the highways with super buses, in a few years all the industry will be theirs.

If the GOB favors owners of high quality buses, they will take over the industry, and quite likely a little down the road they will get the 10-year contracts that present owners in the transportation industry are clamoring for. After they get full control of the industry, they will take their books to the GOB to ask them for relief from the social runs, or they’ll demand higher fares, because super buses are extremely expensive to run on our highways.

How much of what is playing out in the transportation industry can be traced to “our turn” politics is a question to be answered, but what is definite is that commuters deserve comfortable, affordable, safe, punctual buses. The minister has promised that the upgrade is coming, and that job MUST get done. The only question is what road we will take to those better buses.

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