Rush Hour- Leaving the City

The above youtube video is indicative of the eagerness to leave school and transit to a homely environment. Similarly, this is the case of individual who spends an entire day, out of the house; beit at work, school or shopping in the streets. Long hours spent in the CBD of Port-of-Spain leaves people tired and restless, anxious to return to their zone of comfort. The collage of photos seeks to explain the rush of crowds while leaving the CBD. 

Rush Hour Congestion in Transport Terminals
Photo Courtesy: Shalisa Ali and Gopiechand Boodhan

Transportation to and from the city is essential for commuting locales of Trinidad. After a hard day’s work, people trot to various terminals only to be faced with long hours of wait. Crowds gather and congest small buildings and maxi taxi stands awaiting the arrival of buses and water taxis. With reference to the photos above, long lines build up within the PTSC bus stop area, while crowds rush the bus as it stops. Water transport is yet another form that has an increased demand for city-workers living in South, Trinidad. If you take a closer look at the photo on the right, you will see that inside the building is completely packed. Here in itself, rush hour adds to urban congestion in terms of the density of transit systems in the road as well as the number of people moving out of the city.

Crowding is at its highest during the peak hours thus increasing the degree and extent of congested roadways. Congestion is an increasingly unwelcome and costly disease in city life, prompting all sorts of attempts to mitigate it. Based on the urban theory of rush hour as presented by McDonald (2010), one implication of growth in demand is that the rush hour has become longer. This suggests that the more people there are to move out of the city, the more trips buses and taxis will have to make, thus delaying the process of movement. Frequent delays in arrival, transit ridership is becoming more prevalent in off-peak hours as well. On many occasions, sometimes night falls and meets tired workers still waiting for transport to leave the city.

REFERENCES:

 McDonald, John F. and Daniel P. McMillen. 2010. Urban Economics and Real Estate: Theory and Policy. John Wiley and Sons.