Roads in The Bahamas are a bumpy mess. Imagine this, a new smooth and beautiful road is just paved, then merely three weeks later, a road that is supposed to last about 20 years is already bumpy and patched up.
In The Bahamas, we don’t have to imagine; this is precisely what happens.
TLDR
Long story short, the reason why the roads in The Bahamas are so patchy and bumpy is that once a road is paved Bahamas Power and Light, Water and Sewerage, and other utility companies dig it up to access their pipes and wires and then patch it using cold mix asphalt, a quick and improper way of patching the road, that was made for temporary not permant repairs. They use this rather than hot mix asphalt, which is more difficult but the right way, this leads to bumps or potholes. In terms of the patches, each utility company does it by itself, not the Ministry of Works, and they essentially do it however they like, evidently, very badly.
The effects are exacerbated just by the sheer amount of patchwork done, because the Ministry of Works, which builds the roads initially, has no interagency cooperation between it and the utility companies, making it difficult to coordinate.
In fact, there have been instances of new roads being laid, and unmapped utilities by BPL and the Water and Sewerage being discovered during the milling process, leading to immediate, unplanned excavations of the newly prepared road base. Brand new roads being ripped up!
If you wanted the short and simple, that’s it, that’s why the roads are so bad. But in this article, I will dive into exactly why this is the case and possible solutions. Along with a lot of information about the topic.
The most important thing that separates good countries from bad ones is development, plain and simple. I’m referring to public infrastructure such as roads, hospitals, transportation, waste disposal, etc. Roads in particular.
How roads are made in The Bahamas
The primary types of roads used are flexible pavements comprising multiple distinct layers or rigid pavements composed of Portland cement concrete. Essentially all of the roads in The Bahamas are flexible pavements (asphalt roads), so this is the only one I’ll mention in this article. Asphalt roads may seem like just a black slap laid on top of the ground, but in reality, they are comprised of multiple layers and materials. Asphalt concrete, which we usually just call asphalt, is a mixture of about 90 to 95% aggregates, which are rocks, sand, stone, etc., and 5-10% bitumen(Asphalt) binder. It’s made from crude oil and is black, thick and sticky. It is essentially the glue that keeps all the stones together. It is what gives the structure its black colour as well.
For the structure of an asphalt road, at the very base is the subgrade, just the regular soil on the ground. It is compacted to make it strong. Above that is the sub-base, a layer of crushed stone or gravel. Above that is the base course, which takes most of the load; it’s made up of larger aggregates mixed with heavy asphalt binder. And at the very top, the road that we see and drive on is called the surface course. It is made of smaller stones and a higher-quality binder for a smooth, waterproof surface that grips tyres well.
When you’re making asphalt, it likes to be hot, really hot. That doesn’t make sense now, but keep it in the back of your mind. It’ll make sense later in the article.
To make the asphalt, the aggregates (stone, sand etc) are mixed with the hot bitumen binder at 275 – 320 Fahrenheit, to kind of glue the stones together. The hot mixture is loaded onto transport dump trucks, taken to the work site, then it is given to an asphalt paver. This machine spreads the material out in a smooth, even layer of a specific thickness. Finally, it is compacted with an asphalt compactor/vibrator, those large machines with the big steel wheels, or the smaller manually operated machines. The asphalt must be hot at this stage to squeeze out air pockets and lock the stones together. Once the asphalt cools, it sets and becomes rigid.
(Sidenote: the more I look at the top of roads, the more I realise it’s just small rocks glued together with asphalt.)
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Current State of the Roads in The Bahamas
Road construction and maintenance is the responsibility of the Ministry of Public Works. The physical building of these roads is usually done by Bahamix, which is a Bahamian state-owned company. In terms of engineering, the Ministry of Works generally aligns the design manuals with the Florida Department of Transportation and American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) guidelines.
Simply put, when there’s a new road to be built, the Ministry of Public Works paves the road via the aforementioned process. Bear in mind that asphalt roads are meant to last between 15 and 25 years; however, we notice that after a short time, the road becomes bumpy and full of potholes.
This happens because after a smooth, new, beautiful road is built, it’s immediately destroyed by utility companies such as Water and Sewerage and Bahamas Power and Light. This happens because the original road is made up of hot mix asphalt, the asphalt made in the process I described prior, hot mix, as the name suggests, is decently hot, allowing for more compaction and adhesion of the asphalt.
When the utility companies make their repairs, they rip up the original asphalt, which isn’t necessarily an issue, but then they use cold mix asphalt rather than hot mix asphalt. Cold mix asphalt is applied at ambient temperatures rather than being hot. Originally, the patch may be flush and smooth with the rest of the road but this does not last. The use of CMA rather than HMA for permanent repairs creates a “stiffness mismatch.” When vehicles drive over the boundary between the original HMA and the softer CMA patch, the differential deflection causes the edges of the patch to fray, leading to “ravelling” and secondary pothole formation. This is the mechanical origin of the “bump” motorists feel—the patch is literally moving at a different rate than the surrounding road. In other words, the original road and the patch that the utility companies place are different and do not form a continuous bond, so they always remain as two separate structures rather than combining into one, as should happen when the proper repair methods are used. Asphalt also expands and contracts, so when a cold mix patch is used, the road does not move as one road; the different parts expand and contract at different rates.
The reason that they do this rather than using hot mix is that maintaining a hot-mix plant and the associated “hot box” transport equipment is logistically demanding, expensive, and more difficult, whilst cold mix is cheap and easy. Again, this is not the proper way to do things, and using these cheap, shoddy methods slowly destroys the entire road system, leaving it a bumpy mess. This displeases me.
Why?
The main reason that this occurs is due to a lack of coordination and oversight of the Ministry of Public Works, which builds the roads and the utility companies that dig up the roads and evidently do not patch them up properly. This is illustrated in the village road improvement project:
In 2022, a 6.4 million dollar project called the Village Road Improvement Project was started to build new roads, roundabouts, and traffic lights in the area. However, the project had many issues, such as a very delayed timeline since unmapped utilities by Water and Sewerage and Bahamas Power and Light were discovered that necessitated immediate, unplanned excavations of the newly prepared road base. In other words, a brand new road has to be destroyed because of a lack of proper coordination between the entities. The ministry does not know where the pipes and wires are, and when they are damaged, the roads must be excavated and repatched, wasting time and money, and making the roads worse.
The legal framework by which roads are made in The Bahamas is that the Ministry of Public Works has authority over the “public road”, and that any person desiring to excavate must obtain consent and restore the surface “to the satisfaction of the Minister”. The phrase “to the satisfaction of the Minister” is a subjective standard that has historically failed to ensure engineering excellence, and has usually meant that the utility companies just do whatever they want. Usually a not great job. The legal framework also doesn’t have enforcement mechanisms for inter-agency coordination.
Nico’s Solutions
The solutions to these issues, thankfully, I think, are very simple in principle. In order to ensure that the roads are not destroyed by BPL and Water and Sewage after they are made, there must be a digitised utility map for all utlities as well as the Ministry of Public Works for better coordination, there should be a hot mix only mandate prohibiting the use of cold patches for permanent repairs on roads, because they ruin the roads and make them bumpy and full of potholes, third party quality audits must be completed after a patch is made to ensure that it is high quality, and finally there has to be some form of accountability from the utility companies when they ruin the road, in my research I found that other countries with better roads, use “defects liability periods”, where the utility companies must pay if the patches that they make do not hold up for at least 24 months.
That’s it, I hope you all enjoyed. This took much time to research and write, so a follow would be much appreciated. Please also tell a friend and share if you think this article has useful information, as that is how the Nico Miller following grows most. If this article does well and people want to see more, I will also make another about more ways that the road system can be improved.
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