STAYING ON TRACK
IF YOU are a cadet at the Caribbean Maritime University, chances are you are studying one of two things: marine navigation or marine engineering. The roaring voice of the company leader echoed as we entered the room where some 150 bright-faced men and women quickly stood at attention to acknowledge our presence. “Stand by ... Stand up” were the commanding words that were uttered by Chief Officer Cadet Chambers Winston.
With much poise, attention, and confidence, the group of students interacted with members of the Information and Communication Unit of the Jamaica Productivity Centre (JPC) during a recent productivity sensitisation session held at the Palisadoes campus in Kingston.
The journey to the well-kept compound, nicely tucked away from the main road, was not short of signage, eliminating any possible confusion about which turns to take. This, we thought, was extremely important in ensuring that the team did not miss the path and waste time trying to navigate ourselves. Another good thing is that we do not believe that the signs were placed there especially for us or some special event. This is wor thy of highlighting, as many Jamaican businesses fail to offer detailed, clear directions to their business places.
CLEAR NAVIGATION ROUTES
A simple check on Google Maps provides clear navigation routes to the university, with an approximate number of kilometres you can expect to travel as well as the expected amount of time it will take to get to the destination. This information is clearly based on the average speed of traffic in the area, as well as the speed limit for the various thoroughfares, among other factors.
With the availability of this information, the team from the JPC, which was visiting the Caribbean Maritime University for the first time, was able to carefully allocate travel time accordingly. Usually, without proper navigation and signage, one can spend hours trying to find a location. This sort of misdirected activity tends to support the wasting of precious resources such as time and petrol, and contributes to the level of bad driving on our roads.
We must admit, however, that technology has its challenges and will land you in an incorrect location, especially when the roads have not been registered on the platform, as evidenced by the ‘unknown road’ response generally given by Google Maps when the name of a road is not in its archives.