AN OPPOSITION lawmaker has baulked at the Jamaica Urban Transit Company's (JUTC) application for a fare hike, questioning the efficiency of the operations of the cash-strapped entity.

"In terms of coming to the country for a fare increase, it has to be within the context of greater efficiency," Dr Wykeham McNeill said yesterday, during a meeting of the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee of Parliament.

The JUTC wants adult fares to be increased from $50 to $70 and the amount paid by the disabled and children to move from $15 to $20.

Acting president of the JUTC, Paul Abrahams, told the committee that the company had been requesting a fare increase since 2005 without success.

This did not impress committee member Ronald Thwaites who wanted to know whether the JUTC had prepared a business plan to pull the entity from its current financial crisis.

JUTC officials said yesterday that the company was being subsidised to the tune of $100 million per month from the public purse.

"We are mortgaging our grandchildren," Thwaites charged, insisting that the company needed to craft creative ways to pull it out of its unprofitable state.

Questioned request

The Central Kingston Member of Parliament, however, questioned the request for a fare increase in the absence of what he said was "a scheduled programmed advance in service and rationalisation of the system, upon which that application for a fare increase is made. If you don't have that then resistance is inevitable."

Commenting on the challenges facing the bus company, Abrahams said 200 of the JUTC's fleet of buses were in a state of disrepair and there were no funds to repair them.

He said the company rolled out about 300 buses each day. However, by 11 a.m. daily almost 20 buses return to the depots for repair.

The acting president also turned to the premium and express services, rates for which were recently rolled back, saying they might be scrapped as it was not profitable.

Abrahams also told committee members that the company would take back the routes that were sub-franchised to operators in the Kingston Metropolitan Transport Region (KMTR). He said the National Transport Cooperative Society have until December to relinquish the routes it now serviced in the KMTR.