Barbados should make the park-and-ride service a permanent fixture at major events to tackle chronic traffic jams, a leading taxi cooperative president has said, while calling this year’s CARIFESTA XV“transformative” for both operators and communities.
Adrian Bayley, president of the Bridgetown Port Taxi Co-op Society Ltd, told Barbados TODAY the ten-day cultural olympics and the accompanying wave of arrivals and departures provided a welcome boost to the taxi business.
“The ten days of CARIFESTA… has been very [good] for the taxi operators in Barbados,” he said.
Bayley, who has witnessed three editions of CARIFESTA hosted in Barbados, said this year’s edition stood out: “If you go back to 2017 when we had CARIFESTA in Barbados, the hype, there was not that hype, this CARIFESTA… This particular one has been taken to a different level. I must give kudos to those persons who were highly involved in the full production of it.”
He noted that while the festival featured concerts, lectures and high-level regional discussions, the village market had emerged as the true highlight. “Everyone seems to have gravitated towards the village market. It seems to be one of the major attractions coming out of the CARIFESTA. Despite all the super concerts, the village market seems to have stolen all the marks centred around this 2025 CARIFESTA.”
On the operational side, Bayley reported that transportation for delegates and visitors was well organised: “Providing service for the persons who were invited into Barbados at the government level, that was well taken care of by the CARIFESTA Secretariat. We had to provide the transportation, and those guys were assigned to certain islands with delegates for the ten days. That was a success for the taxi operators. There were no complaints coming from any of the drivers. Everyone performed quite well.”
The festival also gave taxi operators the chance to reintroduce a park-and-ride service that had been tested during the 2024 ICC Men’s T20 Cricket World Cup. Bayley said it worked smoothly, with routes linking Queen’s College, the Wildey Gymnasium and the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre to the Botanical Gardens, and Oistins and the Deighton Griffith School to the new National Performing Arts Centre at Newton.
He said, “The highlights of the park-and-ride system, I would say Barbadians are buying into the concept. You drive to a location, you board the taxis. There’s a six-minute duration to fill the taxis, basically with eight to ten persons, and then the drivers go off. All the patrons were quite comfortable with it.”
Bayley argued that the model must become standard practice for large-scale events. “It’s the best system, I think, centred around going to major events in Barbados,” he said. “The footprint of Barbados has not changed since Independence… If we take a check today, there has to be close to 160 000 vehicles on the road. The footprint has not changed. What I’ll say, the government has to be on board, even in a bigger way, to make sure that these events… the government has to make sure that they can get people on board.”
He warned that without proper traffic management, residents in districts surrounding major venues suffer undue stress: “If there’s an event attracting 20 000 or 25 000 people in the Botanical Gardens… you have vehicles on the shoulders of both sides of the roads, at the end of the day, it causes problems for people who live in the area. We have to go forward in a holistic way to make sure that the patrons going into these events are comfortable and the persons who live in the area are also comfortable.”
Bayley recommended that the government also strengthen its partnership with the Transport Board. He said: “The best way is to go forward to expand the park-and-ride system and also embrace the Transport Board bus. The Transport Board also provides their service to provide the parking system and ease the bottleneck of traffic.”
Beyond transport, Bayley said CARIFESTA XV demonstrated the economic power of cultural industries: “When you look at all the people that were moving around…. When you even look at the vendors, this thing has touched such a lot of people. It touched the vendors; it touched almost everybody.”
He stressed that future events should focus on creating commerce for ordinary Barbadians: “These are the trappings that are coming back from Barbadian operators, the taxi operators who would have performed their services. These guys are quite comfortable and they will hope going forward for all conferences coming into Barbados, cricket events, charity festival events again, whatever it is, that we can be engaged in a broader way to ease the situation and to perform our services.”
Bayley also urged the government to ensure that investments in infrastructure, such as the CARIFESTA Grand Market site at the privately owned Waterford Plantation, are used year-round. “You just can’t have the facilities there sitting out for 365 days of the year, and then it’s only utilised 20 out of 365,” he said. “It’s an area that has great, great advantage. It should be utilised in all different ways, just not only for cultural experience. It should be utilised.” (SZB)
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