Measuring rapid rail

In addition, it will subsidise the transport of workers and, ipso facto, the plants and offices where they are employed and act as a tacit restraint on wage and salary demands.

Meanwhile, the use of the Priority Bus Route (PBR) and other former rail beds of the defunct Trinidad Government Railways by the new rail service, plus a limiting of the number of maxi taxis and other vehicles, which today have officially granted access to the PBR, will assist in ensuring that the trains have optimum opportunity to maintain schedules. In turn, a service unhindered by an excess of vehicles competing for space, would have the potential for maximising efficiency.

A crucial aspect of the new rail service is that it will not only encourage scores of private car owners to leave their cars at home, where this is feasible, and travel by rail, but woo other commuters, who today use conventional taxis and maxi taxis as well as PH cars.

It may even act as a restraint on the acquiring of second–hand vehicles by persons who see in them the sole chance today of reaching to work on time. The expenditure on a rapid rail service by Government, estimated to run into billions of dollars, while high, is necessary, if Trinidad and Tobago, a Third World nation is not to continue committing billions of dollars of needed foreign exchange earnings on vehicle imports.

Already, Trinidad and Tobago, a relatively small country with an area of less than 2,000 square miles, has almost 500,000 registered and illegally unregistered vehicles.

But while the foreign exchange expenditure on the import of vehicles and spare parts is a drain, Government’s subsidy on gasolene to keep the vehicles on the road is formidable. This is compounded by the fact that the fuel could easily have been exported at today’s high international prices to bring the country additional revenue. Admittedly, though, the subsidy on gasolene also contributes to the tacit restraint on wages referred to earlier.

The consequent improved productivity and its lowering of production costs will help Trinidad and Tobago manufactured goods be increasingly competitive in the domestic, regional and international marketplace. The importance of this in the non–energy and non–energy-based sectors is difficult to quantify. I remember well though, for example, the surge of national pride almost two decades ago on a visit to Houston, Texas,when I had occasion to go into a leading supermarket I saw Angostura bitters, Matouk jams and other products on sale. What was clearly of import here was the penetration of Trinidad and Tobago products.

It may be argued that Angostura has been a household name, internationally, increasingly since the second half of the 19th century and I had seen it on sale in the US on my first visit during the civil rights days. Yet penetration of regional and international markets and observing this is not simply a matter of national pride.

It will be a question of national survival when free trade becomes an absolute, and more and more of our goods are replaced on domestic market shelves by, in all too many cases, inferior products.

Rapid rail and the determination of nationals, investors, managers and workers alike, to increase productivity, through being on time, accessing required tertiary education and needed skills will all help in keeping the flag of nationally produced goods flying, despite all the winds that blow.

The scores of workers, managerial and professional staff who will man rapid rail will all have to appreciate the need for optimum efficiency, particularly the maintaining of schedules so that manager, worker and schoolchild alike will be able not merely to maintain but assist in increasing worker, pupil and student productivity.