Fix road repairs

On Tuesday night, Dr Keith Rowley told PNM members at the Belmont Community Centre something that everyone in the country already knows, that our roads are bad and only getting worse.

Every community in this country has watched in astonishment as a freshly paved road gets dug up again to fix new leaks, some created by the paving process.

Shoddy patchwork disintegrates through routine use in months, sometimes weeks.

Local road-engineering monitoring is also suspect, on the evidence of the collapse of a section of the new two-kilometre highway at Mosquito Creek.

The PM’s position is that between 2020 and 2021, the money that should have been spent on road infrastructure was spent on pandemic relief.

But TT has already proven its inability to capitalise on the pitch that surges up from the ground in La Brea, and promising to spend more on the problem shouldn’t be the first step.

Billions are poured into a hamster wheel of costly repairs and subsequent destruction.

This running embarrassment of the state’s civil engineers won’t be solved by creating another quasi-government company in the Ministry of Local Government.

In Asia, Singapore tops global evaluations of road surface quality.

Singapore’s engineering feats include the East Coast Parkway opened in 1981, a 19-km expressway built on reclaimed land that soars over a major waterway. The Marina Coastal Expressway, also built on reclaimed soil described by its engineers as “peanut butter,” runs for five km with a 420-metre tunnel built under the sea.

Beyond these engineering achievements, Singapore’s 3,400 km of paved roads are so good that the Singapore Grand Prix is one of only five races in the world that take place on streets built for public use.

Hosting the Grand Prix was a byproduct of Singapore’s approach to road construction, refined over the last 50 years.

To reduce traffic and road impact, the country tried multiple techniques. Singapore largely abandoned vehicle taxes in 1990 in favour of electronic road-use pricing, which levied heavier fees for using vehicles in congested areas, while dramatically improving its public metro transit systems.

Privileged citizens pay to get vehicles that are limited by quota, and use public transport to get to work.

Roads on the island are continuously monitored using sophisticated laser and sonar equipment which gather data for the country’s pavement management system.

Maintenance is scheduled using this active road evaluation, and corrective work on the country’s roads is rare.

Singapore even creates different grades of asphalt to meet the needs of different road systems, balancing wear, grip and safety.

Singapore’s system isn’t perfect, but it aspires to be, and it’s a proven project that the Works Ministry and TT’s traffic planners might draw on.