NASSAU, Bahamas — Traffic congestion in the Caribbean is not just an inconvenience — it is a productivity, health, climate, tourism and planning crisis hiding in plain sight, according to a recent Caribbean Development Bank (CDB / the Bank) seminar, Stuck in Traffic: What Congestion is Costing the Caribbean.

Held during the Bank’s 56th Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors in Nassau, the session examined how rapid urbanisation, high car dependency, limited public transport and constrained road networks have made traffic gridlock increasingly difficult for Caribbean islands to absorb. This challenge has been worsened by narrow rights-of-way, coastal exposure and challenging topography across the region.

The seminar framed congestion as a quantifiable, addressable productivity loss that remains consistently underrepresented in regional policy discourse, positioning it not merely as a traffic problem but as a development issue demanding innovative, context-specific solutions guided by data-driven insights.

Featured expert, transportation planner and traffic engineer Dr. Rae Julien Furlonge, Managing Director of LF Systems Limited, told participants the crisis has flipped the relationship between commuters and their vehicles. “The car is no longer taking you to work.  You are taking the car to work,” said Dr. Furlonge.  Real relief, he added, will require not merely redirecting vehicles but removing them from the road during peak periods, paired with compact urban design, demand-management tools such as pay-as-you-drive schemes, and stronger public transport administration.

Mr. William Ashby, Acting Division Chief of CDB’s Economic Infrastructure Division, outlined the Bank’s evolving response to addressing traffic bottlenecks across the region. “This is not just about financing roads,” he said. “It really is about reshaping the way we consider congestion the way it’s understood and the way it’s addressed,” said Mr. Ashby. He cited CDB-funded public transport studies in Grenada and Saint Lucia, which have springboarded national plans to modernise public and school transportation systems. The advancements in both countries serve as models for the Bank's broader ambition to expand similar investments across its other Borrowing Member Countries. This work will also strengthen traffic-data collection and build institutional capacity for smarter, more sustainable mobility planning.

Both speakers agreed that some solutions already exist, from real-time data platforms and targeted pilot projects to regional knowledge-sharing. They emphasised that what is now required is the collective will to act. “Congestion in the Caribbean is solvable,” Mr. Ashby told the audience, “but only if we treat it as the real development issue that it is.”

The seminar marked the inaugural installment of EdgeX by CDB: Analytics Unlocked, a new knowledge platform designed to turn the Bank's research into practical policy solutions on challenges hiding in plain sight across the region. 

Online audiences are invited to watch the recap of CDB EdgeX Stuck in Traffic: What Congestion is Costing the Caribbean on CDB’s YouTube Channel.

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Caption: Mr. William Ashby, Acting Division Chief of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) Economic Infrastructure Division speaks at EdgeX by CDB - Stuck in Traffic: What Congestion is Costing the Caribbean