By TANYA SMITH-CARTWRIGHT

tsmith-cartwright@tribunemedia.net

ONE local bus driver wants the government to rethink the policy of a maximum 50 percent occupancy on jitneys, questioning how this will work for the industry in the long term.

He spoke as public transport resumed for the first time yesterday since the sector was shut down due to COVID-19.

Lamont Rahming, proprietor of Economy Bus Line and Charter Services, said from what he could see the wearing of masks and social distancing was being adhered to by passengers, but he raised concerns on the occupancy restrictions.

“From what I have seen so far, yes it seems like people (bus passengers) are adhering to social distancing and wearing masks,” said Mr Rahming. “But, I would have to check with my drivers at the end of the day to see if this was carried out with all the passengers.”

A mandate attached to the re-entry of the jitney system is that buses can only operate at 50 percent occupancy to ensure social distancing. This, Mr Rahming said, will be hard on the pocket.

“The understanding is that you are only able to operate at 50 percent occupancy,” he continued. “That breaks down to approximately 15 passengers. I do think that this is going to be a difficult situation to manage because you have to think of it not only from the temptation of making more money, especially if the driver is thinking, ‘well no police here right now so let me take the chance.’ So the temptation is there but not only that, this all happens when school is closed, thankfully.

“What is going to happen if we are under these same circumstances and school is open? So let’s say school is open and its 7am, are you going to give priority to the student who needs to get to school or the person who needs to get to work? That can cause some issues as well.”

Mr Rahming is hopeful that the government reviews and “adjusts” the occupancy restriction.

“I am not the type to knock anything before I see how it performs but it seems to be quite a challenge,” Mr Rahming said before giving an example of what he thinks could work. “Another one of my industry partners gave an example that if one takes a flight anywhere in this country, you are going to be on the plane for a minimum of 45 minutes. The airlines in the US are getting some push back as they are not going to do the social distancing thing. They are going to maximise capacity. That’s how you make your money; put people on the bus. So his (the industry partner’s) position was if we are able to enforce the wearing of the mask they should be safe because nobody’s going to be on the bus for such an extended period anyway.”

Mr Rahming also said having less passengers on board will hit bus drivers economically.

“It’s a difficult situation when you have your income potentially cut in half right from the get go,” he explained. “Of course you are thankful that you are up and running able to earn a living but it’s been hampered significantly. We just have to see how it’s going to work.

“If we are going to be compliant with the protocols of wearing the mask, we think we should be able to still operate at how it was in the past. We will see how it goes. The one thing we are hopeful for is that the administration has shown the ability to pivot if they think that something needs to be corrected so hopefully they will adjust it.”

Mr Rahming explained how some drivers were able to survive with no income during the shutdown.

“Thankfully you would listen to that old adage of putting something aside for a rainy day,” he said. “We were able to do the whole deferral of payment thing with the banks and just a matter of pinching and stretching whatever cash you had access to. It was a very difficult time considering we had zero income coming in so it made things very, very difficult.

“For us, our staff is registered with the National Insurance Board so they were able to take advantage of that. And, even the other owners, or independent operators were still able to register and take advantage of the NIB payments. So there was some assistance rendered from the government. There were situations where some of these guys would have been not contributing to National Insurance in some cases, but the government still made it available to them. So some assistance was rendered in that aspect.”