JUTC to launch Portmore shuttle
THE Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC) announced yesterday that it will soon begin a service within Portmore as part of a move to rationalise its routes, drive up revenue and save on costs.
The state-owned bus company also outlined its plans to build new terminals in Kingston and open its Rockfort depot, and said that it has acquired 100 new buses to add to its fleet of more than 580.
“What we will see coming out of 2003-2004 budget exercise is the rationalising of the JUTC… It will be taking into consideration what we have learned over the years of operation from all of this overlapping of (routes),” the company’s president, Sterling Soares, told reporters at a briefing at the JUTC’s Twickenham Park, St Catherine depot.
The JUTC was launched in 1999 to run what, under private operators, had become a ramshackle, free-for-all bus service.
While it has significantly improved the capital’s bus service, it has lost heavily and at mid-year the consulting firm, Peat Marwick was reporting that the JUTC, with accumulated losses of over $2.6 billion and negative net worth of $1.3 billion, was technically insolvent.
However, a group of Swedish transport consultants have in recent months been conducting a review of the JUTC’s operations and apparently some of the plans disclosed by Soares are outlined in their report, which, Observer sources say, include job cuts.
According to Soares, the service within Portmore, a sprawling township just west of Kingston, would lessen the number of buses that have to travel between the capital and that community, particularly over the bridge across the Kingston harbour that links the two centres.
“What we are trying to do is to cut down on the number of buses that are going across the causeway in order to reduce our cost of operating in Portmore,” he said. “So what will happen is that there will be an intra-Portmore system where you would have standardised points where you would go on another bus that would go non-stop from there into Kingston — downtown or Half-Way-Tree.”
Part of the rationale for the move, Soares said, was that during rush hour the Portmore causeway is one-way and buses on their return journey had to travel a long route along the Mandela Highway. These return journeys are with almost empty buses which contribute to costs.
He did not give a timetable for the start of the service and neither did he give a date for the start of construction of a planned terminus in Half-Way-Tree to eliminate the road clutter and to have a single area for transferring passengers.
The government more than two years ago bought the former Odeon cinema in Half-Way-Tree for the construction of a terminus and transfer centre. Part of the old complex houses stores and it also hosts a used car dealership.
Soares also repeated the JUTC’s plan to build a downtown Kingston terminus on Port Royal street to eliminate staff, to have a more efficient and modern facility to replace those at Duke Street, Parade and Beckford Street.
The company’s new depot at Rockfort in East Kingston will soon be completed and this will eliminate the need to operate two zones from Ashenheim Road, thereby bringing buses closer to requisite routes and improving efficiency.