The man whose expertise lies at the centre of the Solomon Hochoy Highway extension to Point Fortin, Dr Rae Furlonge, amid all the controversy, stands by the design. Furlonge, a senior traffic engineer, was contracted by the National Insurance Development Company (Nidco) to make recommendations on how to facilitate the demands of traffic but minimise the disruption and impact. He says: “I’m not pulling punches I have nothing to hide and nothing to gain by hiding anything.”
The studies he led uncovered that more than 100,000 vehicles pass in and out of the southland. Further to this, he says while there are many inter and intra southland transits, “we found that a lot of traffic travelling from North to external, past San Fernando to get down to areas on the western and eastern sides of the peninsula.” Furlonge says he used a scientific approach and his views were based on analyses of traffic counts, origins and destination and travel times.
Antagonists are contesting the viability of many legs of the network, saying there was no need to link rural hubs, but his studies showed that Siparia and Point Fortin were the most inaccessible towns. The highway is designed with a practical capacity of 1,600 cars an hour and the route is primarily the same as proposed by consultant LEA-Trintoplan in 2005. Furlonge said the route was designed to fit traffic needs until 2035 and would accommodate an annual two per cent increase in vehicles.
That’s close to two 200,000 vehicles 20 years from now. A second study using geographic information systems (GIS) was undertaken and had similar findings. It involves a computer programme selecting the best route by working in restrictions, such as wetlands, protected areas, historical sites and gas pipelines. “Amazingly, the computer-generated route was very close to what the manual route done by LEA-Trintoplan achieved,” Furlonge said.
Asked to settle the controversy “does the route pass through wetlands?” he pointed at a map showing the lagoon in blue, with the road nowhere close. “Look where the lagoon area is. This is the highway, the west side, and this is Mon Desir and Debe. Where are you seeing blue?”
His team also analysed the initial route proposed by the Highway Re-route Movement (HRM). “That’s absurd, because you are simply looking at lines and saying let it function to move traffic,” was his initial reaction. The HRM proposed the expansion of existing local roads into arterial roads, something Furlonge says can never take place in a first-world territory.
“You just want to use roads willy-nilly? Those are local roads. People must be able to walk the roads comfortably,” he said. But Furlonge admitted that while the highway was a must, it was not the solution to traffic. He explained the highway addressed the baseline need for connectivity but it certainly was not the solution, especially as the country approached vehicle saturation.
What is needed, he says, are policies to manage road use since each person in the country travelled by vehicle at least once every day. The highway, he maintains, provides accessibility to the regions to and within the region’s most traversed areas.
•Conclusion of five-part series tomorrow