St. Maarten Private Eye

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What's gonna happen in high season as traffic has to stop for travelers to cross the street to the airport? I see more back ups than ever. Is there a plan?
irina

I sure do hope there is a solution out there, as this current situation with passengers crossing the main road with their luggage seems ridiculous. I am stopped at this crossing approximately 4 times per day to let people cross. And you have to stop as it is a Zebra Crossing. I hope "they" have a plan for some type of bridge as I cannot see any other possible solution.

We all know that the politicians on Sint Maarten read this website.
Question: What are you going to do about this traffic chaos before a serious riot brakes out ???? It is ridiculous. Traffic is backed up everywhere 24/7. It is completely out of control and it will only get worse. You have to interfere, take your responsibility and come up with some drastic measures.
Ignore those who benefit from bringing, selling and renting cars and keeping them on the road and be guided by the bigger picture for once.
The clock is ticking and not far from either the tourist massively avoiding Sint Maarten or the people literally kicking you out of office because you just dont seem to care how people have to live here. It is simply beyond belief.

What to do? Here is a couple: Restrict the import of cars and levy duties, upgrade roads and build the Cole Bay roundabout, promote the construction of parking garages and parking lots by giving subsidy and tax relief, invest in better public transportation, restrict the number of cars per family, promote the use of scooters, promote the use of small buses and taxi's, introduce trolley services in Town and in Simpson Bay and close frontstreet and backstreet for traffic, make rentals extremely expensive or ban them all together for a while, introduce black out periods for heavy traffic (07.00 - 19:00) and give ridiculous fines (like 5000 or so) to all violators and confiscate the vehicles until it is paid, ban big busses or make it very unattractive to use them and fine them with extreme fines if they are moving with 5 mph over our roads and the best one of them all:

Stop immigration for at least a year. Just make it known that all applications will be turned down and clean up this Island. Simply less people on this overcrowded place may improve our way of living and it gives the local a real chance on the labor market. "Creating" 180 jobs and issuing 180 permits does not help much either. Pick one of the above or any combination or think of something yourself but DO something. Thank you.

I just wish the people would put the politicians' election chances put in such jeopardy, that they would do something about the traffic. But no, we always have to wait for an election. If the people are so blind as to be fooled with these cheap cynical stunts, then I guess they deserve who they vote for.

On that point, remember Roy Boy dug up all of Welfare Rd between Cay Bay Rd and the turn off to Philipsburg, as some kind of misguided election strategy. The result was people had to endure gravel roads and huge traffic snarls as they went to vote. Remember! I wonder what road construction he has planned to coincide with the the election and the high season. You see if there is an election and his advisers tell him to dig up the roads for election favor, he does not care what kind of inconvenience it will be for tourists or locals. He did it last time, let's see if he has learned anything from the past, or whether he even noticed it hurt him. By all accounts I know of one of his advisers who urged him strongly not to do the roadwork at the time, but I guess he still owed Windward Roads some work for favors given, so that must have been more important than some

Blackout periods (6am-6pm) for heavy vehicles is already law on the French side, and see how much good that does. I have never seen a truck pulled up by the Gendarmes. Do you mean you want to actually slow down the rate and the number of hours available for Etienne Meyers and his buddies to dig up this island and carry it somewhere else on the roads causing miles of traffic jams and mayhem in the process? I don't think so! That one will never fly, next suggestion...

As to heavy fines. Look what happened when Paul Mooij brought the environmental criminals to court--not only didn't they get fined, they didn't even bother to show up for the court case. But still the 5000 sounds like a nice number. Never happen though. As for keeping their trucks. Hmmmm, I don't think that will happen any time unless, Gracita maybe becomes President or whatever else is the new title for our head of state.

Big buses Hmmm, my pet subject. Ban them because they are big or ban them because they are used as weapons to stop other buses passing them and grabbing what they believe to be their passengers? Well Louie still hasn't explained why we have this sudden rush of 20 years old hurriedly resprayed unroadworthy buses on our roads. I wrote this and got quite a response, but no action My Opinion in Today

I am not sure if stopping immigration is the solution either, since 20,000 of people living here are not immigrants but are residing here illegally and using the roads and facilities and we have to build more infrastructure to accommodate people who should not even be here. Still, what a fine way to start off your immigration to a new country by breaking its laws. But the island definitely has enough legal people here, I will grant you that.

Some nice ideas. The real question is who will have the guts to take those tough decisions and risk putting off side the formerly illegal (now residents) who do have a vote. Certainly not this present shabby line-up of political entrepreneurs will do anything as politically suicidal as that.

Still, at least we are getting the message out and someone like yourself can see the problems from afar. Such a pity you don't contribute more as a registered user rather than remaining anonymous. But this is definitely the kind of thinking that changes things. We need to hear more from locals who are not blinkered to what is happening to their island; who aren't mesmerized by the free election concerts and chicken and beers.

Your ideas may sound radical at first, but if we can stop just one of those Mack trucks from crawling up the Cole Bay hill spewing black smoke, get the truck impounded due to non payment of breaching the blackout period, then I think it will have made it all worthwhile. Then we would be energized and enthused enough to strike at the heart of the bus problem, immigration, environmental standards, etc etc. etc.

This election, let's make sure the politicians hear what is going on in in the heartbeat of their community, and force those money hungry politicians shut up their mouths and listen, or send them packing. We are not dreaming, people can make a difference. The American Revolution had less than 12 people who began it, and most died of old age as they were already in their 80s and 90s when it began. We can make a difference, but takes hard work, organization and honest people.

PS: Flipper thanks for the spell checker. Now 1602 should have less to complain about.

SXMObserver

Anyone can see it is choking our roads and making the plkace very unattractive to visitors. In fact if the U.S. visitors knew what traffic they are heading into, they would definitely go somewhere else, because one of the main reasons get away is to get away from road traffic.

Stop immigration and clean up the island from illegals is indeed what I meant. Stopping all permit applications for a while means you have manpower available to remove the many illegals that clog up our infrastructure.

Radical suggestions for radical times. That is what needed. You have any?
But we also need a change of mentality. It has always been too much bon-ton on Sint Maarten not to step on anyone's toes. Only the votes count. Getting those from the limited number of voters (14.000) has always been more important than the general well being of the massess (50.000). Next election, the message should be clear: Just Say No to the Democrats! or nothing will ever change.

Unfortunately this site does not have a very good structure for the organisation of comments and news clippings. This page is really the Airport Thread, a place where all news for the airport gets stored.

I have turned off comments on this thread, please continue your discussion of Status Apart and Politics on the post on the front page. There is also a blog post about traffic, a good place to comment about traffice problems. One day we will find a sponsor who will fund the improvements we want to make here, I hope you understand that turning off the comments is not to stop you, just to try to keep some kind of order for other people to follow.

Thank you for being a part of this site, we all live and learn from eachother and we all become stronger by knowing we are not alone, that the madness we see around us is not just in our heads. There are many who appear to be good writers and I hope you all consider writing a blog post one day soon.

Flipper