Submitted Ready Done
Last night I was in the Fairchild street bus terminal and low and behold the entrance still has not been fixed. It has been in the current state for more than 10 years. It seems there was a serious attempt to fix it about three weeks ago. Instead, the first gate now not accessible, reducing overall passenger flow by one third. The nation’s leaders are currently saying the working class is lazy and unproductive, the average bus traveler spends 2 hours a day in the bus terminal, this translates to 10 hours a week or about 21 full days of a year sitting in the bus terminal. What a unproductive use of time.
The design of the lower green bus stand is a joke on poor people at best, what is that? There is no shelter from the elements and one has to wait extremely long hours for a bus. If we are asking for an increase in productivity the authorities have to provide the framwork . There are many ways this can be done, I think the buses on route should have GPS functionality on their Facebook page so that we can see realtime where the buses are located and the bus terminal should have a LED display stating the next departure time. You can even re-purpose the old LEDs from the unused buses for this job.
The most obvious place where there is room for improvement is in the gathering of information about the needs of the traveling public. In 2005 the General Manager David Jean-Marie stated, “This new ticketing system is fast, accurate and reliable and brings together powerful, electronic ticketing equipment with an integrated software package, which allows the Board to generate reports to facilitate wide-ranging management decisions. In addition, it will also afford the Board the opportunity to closely monitor its ridership patterns and thereby increase its operating efficiencies as it relates to productivity, allocation of routes and disbursement of buses while also improving on the productivity of ancillary departments.”
I wonder how long it will it take for people on this island to use commonsense. the Wayfarer System of ticketing was clearly implemented without consulting the bus drivers, the people who have to operate it. My crude observation is that it has the potential to be a big help for the transport board but currently it is just a burden. My research on the Internet revealed that 29 ticketing systems cost 10,000 pounds or $30,000 Bajan. I don’t know how many buses have this system installed, it is therefore difficult to say how much taxpayers paid for a useless technology.
The challenge is that to get accurate information about customer travel habits. The driver will have to ask ALL passengers where they want to disembark which makes no sense. If the drivers were involved from the start I believe the system would better designed – i.e. record the on/off stops and time of the traveling public. This way you would have an accurate reading of the number of buses needed. The management is guessing when they should be seriously gathering information. Case in point I was traveling from Bridgetown to Baird’s Village (the Aquaponic farm) but look what the ticket shows. I want to point out though the bus did come and departed on time.
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