You may remember the alarming incident last year when two women narrowly escaped serious injury after parts of the Novelo’s Bus Terminal roof came crashing down. While the roof was quickly patched up, the scare exposed a much bigger issue—the terminal is in desperate need of full renovation. Well, change is finally on the horizon. Today, the government made a public commitment to revamping the heavily used terminal. C.E.O. of the Ministry of Transport, Chester Williams, toured the facility alongside Chief Transport Officer Leon Gentle and Deputy Transport Officer Peter Williams to assess the damage and discuss what improvements are coming. We caught up with the team during their walkthrough to find out what commuters can expect from the upcoming upgrades.
Chester Williams, C.E.O., Ministry of Transport
“From my tour of the terminal itself, we have seen a number of deficiencies things that we believe needs to be improved. One of the main concerns that people have is that when it rains, the terminals do take water, at least about three inches of water inside the terminal itself. And so they may be a need to bring in a contractor to look at it and see what, if anything can be done to raise the flooring. Perhaps maybe about three inches and that way the water will be able to slide out of the terminals as opposed to coming into the terminal. Again, the seating arrangement inside the terminal is certainly inadequate. We just have one metal thing on the chair that people sit on. I don’t think that it’s comfortable for anybody to, to sit on, and so that needs to be improved. There is nothing inside the terminal that tells the commuter the commuters what are the schedule of the buses. And so we’re looking at putting in screens in the terminals that will be able to depict the bus schedules of each of the different bus companies so that when you come to the terminal and you want and what time, what bus will leave, you can go to the screen just like when I go to on airport and the screen will tell you James will leave at the set time. BWOC will leave at the set time and that will be able to help people to schedule themselves more better. We have bathrooms where that women are using and the doors are broken. People can go and peep on them when they’re using the bathroom. It cannot work. These bathrooms are used by pregnant women on a daily basis. Who traverses the terminal. Again, we have to make sure the bathrooms are in a state of good hygiene. I am happy to see that the terminal supervisor, Ms. Hyde, she seems to be on top of her game. ’cause I can say that while the infrastructure may not be how we want it to be in terms of the cleanliness of the bathroom, it is extremely clean. So I can see that they’re doing well in terms of maintaining the cleanness of the bathroom. And so we will work with them to make sure that we can fix the problem that do exist. Again, the objective is to make sure we provide good quality service to and people.”
