Construction of Gudele II bus park commences
The Central Equatoria State Transport and Drivers Union has embarked on opening new bus parks across Juba City to ease traffic.
According to the Union, there is a lack of enough space for public taxi parks for the drivers to operate, and as a result, they always incur fines from the traffic police when they operate along the roads.
Juma Kulang Lako, the CES Drivers Union Secretary General for Organization and Mobilization, said it was wonderful to see that authorities were allocating such a place for the union to set up as a taxi park.
“As you can see throughout the city, the roadsides have been converted into parks for the bus drivers. We are therefore looking for potential locations to establish some additional ones,” Lado said.
He was speaking at the opening of Gudele Two’s brand-new 60-metre tax park, which is situated next to Gudele’s main police station on Joppa Road.
The new bus park, according to Mr Lado, will make it easier for drivers to park their vehicles where they belong instead of roads side.
“The building of stations for public bus riders balances the efforts of the transport and drivers’ union to improve the infrastructure for public transportation and encourages them to use open space for loading the passengers in their daily movements.”
He said that even though they were granted a working area, much still needs to be done to accommodate all of the buses in the park at once.
To prevent the difficulties when people are travelling home after work, he urged the county officials to allot more parks in the city.
At the same event, Henry Mangisto, commonly known as Jamaica, the head of the Gudele II Park Union, thanked the state drivers’ union for making the wise decision to create new parks.
He added that Gudele II was one of the areas with the worst record of congestion for public transportation due to its large population.
“It is one of the issues that we have been raising day and night, especially you have seen the drivers these days parking and loading the people on the new Habubo Bridge which is not good and was the source of traffic jam.”
He urged the drivers to follow the instructions provided by the authority and refrain from loading or unloading people from buses on the sides of the road.
If the new parks become operational, he said, there will be no justification for anyone to load buses at the side of the road.
