Guyana Electrical Consultants & Associates

About a year ago Stabroek Business got a call from a young man proposing to install new traffic lights in the city.As anyone can testify, almost every traffic light in Georgetown has been out of order and those that were fixed, quickly broke. To drive through junctions is to play a guessing game and at times a lethal game of bluff as the drivers who ended up killing destitute Petal Blair, learnt on Sunday night.     

The police briefly fixed the lights on Camp and Lamaha Sts last month but these conked out a few days later. One of the problems had been the question of whose jurisdiction this problem fell under as in the case of the fire hydrants.

Then Traffic Chief Michael Harlequin had told this newspaper that the traffic signals were part of the Road Engineers’ Department of the Ministry of Public Works with the police ensuring the lights work in keeping with their mandate of controlling traffic flows.

The Ministry of Public Works and Communications said that although the ministry has control over the erection of traffic lights, jurisdiction is then passed to the traffic department which oversees their functioning. Several of the signals have been around between 35 to 40 years and some have been damaged by contractors, making it difficult to undertake repairs.

So we visited with the local company, Guyana Electrical Consultants at a home in Republic Park, and to be honest were initially rather sceptical of their plan. There on the living room coffee table was a cardboard box with some lights sticking out of it. It was hardly impressive but as they spoke it was clear they had done some thorough research into the subject and despite being young were professional, and focused on the project.       

Their prototype worked off an electronic controller and had been programmed to a 30-second red/amber/green cycle that was fail safe. (Green can never be on one side of the unit when on the other.) And they said it would be 60% cheaper than imported systems. They also suggested that the units could be part of a larger network that could actually control traffic flow throughout the city depending on vehicle density. This would require cameras or sensors in the road to help controllers make decisions.

That was almost a year ago and even before that meeting, in June 2004 they had approached the traffic department offering their services.

Well one year on, the lights on the Avenue of the Republic and Regent St have been working for about three weeks without a noticeable glitch after GEC installed a system.

A working traffic light is hardly a cause for jumping up and down with joy in most countries and perhaps not even in Guyana. But it is significant because it shows that a private local company when given the chance can provide a simple and reliable solution to a problem that boggles the mind of ordinary citizens why it cannot be fixed. It also demonstrates there are young people with ideas and the persistence to keep pestering the bureaucracy until they are given a chance.

We hope that now it is becoming apparent to the police that rather than looking overseas for expensive contracts inevitably requiring a consultant, a small company is perfectly capable of providing what almost every other country takes for granted.