Flexitime to stop traffic nightmare

THE EDITOR: What worked 30 years ago is outdated today. Until there is a new traffic plan, please bring back former Port of Spain mayor Louis Lee Sing’s plan of 2014-15, which allowed traffic to flow all day long.

On October 31, the traffic jam going east, from Cocorite to downtown Port of Spain, at 4.30 pm was bumper to bumper and some people got home at 10 pm. But there was little traffic using Mucurapo Road or the Western Main Road.

I noticed more than 16 large 20-foot containers turning around on the Audrey Jeffers Highway near MovieTowne merging into the traffic jam. These large containers and gasoline trucks should be made to use the roads between 1 am and 4 am daily, as is done in larger countries, not joining the jam at peak hours.

Businesses should allow their staff to work flexible hours. Employees with schoolchildren can go to work earliest and leave first, not as is the practice now with most companies closing at the same time and their workers joining in the traffic congestion that is TT.

In this the 21st century, why do our citizens have to spend unproductive hours in traffic jams? Surely, our traffic management can do better to ease the congestion, because nothing else is moving forward during this recession.

PATRICIA BLADES via e-mail