Getting into central Georgetown in daylight hours can tax the nerves of even someone with a steel will. Traffic congestion has, over the past few years, grown monumentally. In addition, jaywalking has once again burgeoned out of control with major contributions by the insane and the inane alike, while beggars stake out traffic lights, stalking drivers as doggedly as politicians try to woo voters in a dead-heat elections race. And we know a little bit about that.
What happens on the roads every day gives new meaning to the term rush hour. A more fitting description would be crazy hour, with the crazies attempting all sorts of stunts in an effort to outdo each other. Sadly, too often, lives are lost as a result as occurred recently on Aubrey Barker Road.
Unfortunately, central Georgetown’s network of roads is more or less static. While they could all do with more maintenance and there are several that could be widened, there is no scope for adding to the network. The congestion must therefore remain something that citizens have to live with. The crucial thing is that there must be some semblance of order and of recognition that getting from one point to the next will take longer than before because one is driving in a tiny city—by modern standards—with thousands of vehicles, and each driver has the same motive.
While there is some amount of build-up, mainly during the early morning and early evening hours—the time when schoolchildren and ‘9-5ers’ go to school/work and back home—traffic flows a bit more smoothly along the East Coast Demerara. The reason is that the embankment road offers an alternative route, taking off some of the traffic that would have otherwise been on the main road.
If the Georgetown traffic scene is scary, the East Bank Demerara road is, unequivocally, a nightmare. Busy describes it at the best of times. During rush hour, it becomes a stress and hypertension trigger. Besides being the only road by which one can drive to Guyana’s international airport, it is the only route to the Demerara Harbour Bridge by which one can get to the West Demerara and further afield, unless one wants to go via speedboat. It is the route one must travel to get to the Linden-Soesdyke Highway and eventually, far flung areas such as Bartica, Mahdia and Lethem—to name a few—if one elects to use vehicular transportation.
The incumbent government announced recently, that another contract has been signed to widen another section of the East Bank Demerara road, which would include the Diamond corridor, a fast-growing residential, and, more recently, commercial area. Unfortunately, unless there are plans to remove some residents who reside along the roadway on both sides, the widening will be constricted in some places to not more that a few feet. While a wider road may ease congestion, it will not happen in a hurry. History has taught us that road repair/expansion takes years. And even when it‘s done, the effect of the expansion will only bring comfort until the next shipment of cars, minibuses, Titans, Tundras and Hummers arrive and are purchased by or for increasingly younger drivers, who feel it is their right to stop suddenly to have a conversation with a driver in the opposite lane or to park willy nilly, reducing already narrow two-lane roads to a single ‘squeeze’ lane.
One wonders why, given the success of the embankment road, its importance, and the fact that the East Bank road runs perilously close to the Demerara River in some places, serious attempts have not been made to build a second road to the airport. There are sufficient engineers to carry out the necessary studies and select the most suitable site/s. Surely, the IDB, World Bank or some other major donor would be interested in such a project.
