I went to Barbados with a camera – #3

Part 3. This might be a 3-parter; we’ll see.

Barbados is pretty British, and one reflection of that is Bridgetown. I don’t know what it is that the British have against grids, but they seem to hate ‘em. While the Spaniards gave Port of Spain a nice orderly arrangement, in Bridgetown, the streets meet at odd angles and generally seem to lead nowhere in particular. Makes for a more interesting walking (and driving) experience. The picture above shows Broad Steet, the main shopping strip, looking towards Parliament and “National Heroes Square” (formerly known as Trafalgar Square; I told you they were British). Also, The Cave Shepherd in this picture was one of my favourite places in Barbados as a child. I think I really liked the in-store cafeteria.

I went to Barbados with a camera – #2

Part 2 of a series of indefinite length

Back when I would visit Barbados a couple times a year, I feel like you didn’t have to spend half your beach trip asking vendors to leave you alone. On the other hand, maybe it’s just that when I was a kid, we avoided the tourist beaches. Well, don’t tell anyone I told you, but Brownes Beach, pictured above, is just south of the capital, filled with the white sand and turquoise waters of tourism ads, and vendor-free. It’s where I spent many a school vacation years ago, and it continues to be a locals’ beach today. Check it out if you get sick of being offered “ganja” (they are so brazen about it, I swear it must be oregano).

Stranded in Toledo

There’s been a lot of talk about the death of the exurb, brought about by increasing fuel prices and transportation costs (combined with a slowing economy). What you hear less about (well, what I hear less about) is the new isloation being faced by semi-isolated medium sized towns. These places are too far away from large cities to effectively benefit from their infrastructure, but are also too close (and too small) to support effective infrastructure of their own. Toledo is a good example of this, being 2 hours from Detroit and Cleveland, and it’s about to get hit pretty hard by the cuts in flying amongst the major airlines.

Expensive oil is a double-whammy for places like Toledo. Their air links will continue to be severed as airlines are forced to cut back. Meanwhile, driving 90-120 minutes to DTW or CLE becomes a lot harder when gas prices are over 4 dollars a gallon. We have started talking a lot about investing in transit infrastructure in our metropolitan areas, and we should. But we should also remember that after decades of neglect in favour of cars and planes, our intercity rail infrastructure is a joke, and places like Toledo and Bakersfield and Harrisburg — places that are close to being in the middle of nowhere, but not quite — are probably about to be cut off as a result. Something to keep in mind as we (hopefully) have more success in getting politicians to address the problems of cities.

Competition = scary!

I’ve spoken before about the reluctance of Caribbean governments to allow their citizens to benefit from airline competition, and here we have another example:

The Government has, for the time being, rejected Caribbean low-cost carrier Airone’s formal application to the Civil Aviation Authority for a licence to operate in Jamaica.

Airone, the brainchild of a group of Irish entrepreneurs, including Digicel’s vice-chairman Leslie Buckley, is seeking to establish a Low-Cost Carrier (LCC) with the Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston serving as its hub.

Ostensibly, though, this time there’s a “good” excuse:

However, last Thursday, the minister without portfolio in the Ministry of Finance, Don Wehby, and a team of Government officials took the decision not to grant the new airline a licence now, essentially because the Government is in the process of divesting the loss-making Air Jamaica and it was felt that a decision to grant another carrier a licence at this time would adversely effect the divestment of the national carrier.

Now, I guess they have a point here. The government does need to weigh the potential cash windfall to the taxpayers (assuming the proceeds are used to the taxpayers’ benefit) against the benefits of a low cost competitor. On the other hand, the article makes clear that the government claims that they’d be willing to issue a license after AJ is divested, which… wouldn’t that also affect the value of AJ for potential buyers? One could imagine the eventual AJ investors lobbying against a license, and then, of course, the excuse would be some bullshit about how AJ represents Jamaican national character, or whatever. All this is to say nothing of the fact that the competition (and extra seats to a tourism dependent island) almost certainly outweighs the likely money from divesting AJ, especially given the tortured history of Caribbean airline privatization (see, also, BWIA).

But there’s a silver lining to all this:

“If we are unsuccessful in Jamaica we will set up operations in Barbados. If Air Jamaica is not divested in 12 months’ time, then Jamaica would have missed out on having an affordable, reliable carrier that would have been a boon to the tourism industry and Jamaicans living around the world.”

PLEASE oh PLEASE come to the Eastern Caribbean instead! I’d love to have another competitor to the horrible planes and service from BWIA Caribbean Airlines available.

Unrelated: As of this post, I am switching to using tags, rather than categories. In case you care.