(Trinidad Guardian) Works and Infrastructure Minister Dr Suruj Rambachan has admitted that congestion on the nation’s roads has been fuelling road rage, stress, lack of productivity and takes away from family and leisure time. In the last two years, Rambachan said his ministry has been implementing measures to reduce the gridlock, which continues to be of great worry and concern to him.
From 2010 to 2015, Rambachan said the Programme for Upgrading Roads Efficiency has injected $4.4 billion on the widening and building of new roads, construction of interchanges, highways, bypasses and overpasses to ease the bottlenecks faced by motorists daily. Also $300 million was spent to rehabilitate 25 bridges across the country. “These bridges were not structurally sound, which motorists were using every day. Since we came into Government there has been a lot of road development.
“When you look at what we inherited to where we are now we have done quite a lot,” Rambachan said at his Port-of-Spain office on Wednesday. Rambachan attributed the gridlock to several factors, but pointed out that the growing number of vehicles on the roads was adding to the problem.
At the end of 2014, Rambachan said the Licensing Office had recorded 786,297 registered vehicles. From 2011 to 2014, Rambachan said 106,074 vehicles were registered, which he described as phenomenal.
