JUTC responds to public queries about preaching on the buses

The Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC) has responded to public queries about why the company’s stated ban on preaching on its fleet of buses is not being ‘religiously enforced’.

Speaking to Loop News on Wednesday, Reginald Allen, Marketing and Communications Manager at the JUTC, said the policy against preaching on the buses remains in place at the bus company. However, he said while it has been minimised, the odd breaches do continue to take place.

He said the difficulty was with a single operator on each bus dealing with a number of functions, and also being required to enforce the no-preaching policy.

Allen also indicated that a source of the continuation of the problem has been the extreme stridency on the part of some of the preachers in their efforts to impart their messages to the commuters.

“The odd ones will simply ignore the driver’s direction that preaching is not allowed on the buses, and continue in their efforts, in spite of a polite intervention by the driver,” said Allen. “Then it becomes a challenge for the driver to seek to have the preacher removed from the bus, and some will simply ignore the individual in a bid to keep the situation calm and civil.”

Allen said it should be recognised that despite the ban on preaching on the buses, there is still a wide divide between those for and against the in-transit preaching. Hence, he elaborated that getting the imposing preachers off the bus was not always the best immediate answer, and the drivers have to generally make an on-the-spot decision of the immediate approach to take.

However, Allen said with intensified monitoring of the buses expected to come on stream from members of the company’s security team, as well as personnel from the Revenue and Franchise Protection Department, the bus preachers who are still in business will likely come under increased scrutiny and hindrance in their bids to continued their banned activities.