A week after a very pregnant Arlene Laban-Ammon and her husband were stopped, ticketed and ordered off the Priority Bus Route while she was in labour, she is now calling on the authorities for clearer guidelines on the use of the PBR.
Noting that an emergency C-section saved her child’s life after they got to the hospital two hours after being put off the PBR, Laban-Ammon is now calling for a clear policy on the use of the PBR.
In an interview with the T&T Guardian yesterday, Laban-Ammon, 36, said around 6 am last Monday she and her husband, Donny Ammon, left their Arima home to go to the St Augustine Private Hospital as she was having contractions.
On their way to the hospital, Laban-Ammon said she begged Donny to get there quickly as her contractions became increasingly painful.
“I started to get more and more pain and the traffic was not moving at all.
“I remembered seeing Inspector (Roger) Alexander saying you can use the PBR in the case of an emergency so I asked Donny to go onto the bus route,” she said.
She said her husband drove onto the bus route where they intended to flag down any police officer they might seen for an escort to the hospital. However, after several minutes, the couple saw a police officer who ordered them to pull over.
“They were pulling aside all vehicles without passes and when the officer came up to the car, he asked Donny what he was doing on the bus route.
“Donny told him I was in labour and we were trying to get to the hospital and he asked why we didn’t call an ambulance. Donny then told him we have a car, so we drove instead.
“He said, ‘Yuh playing brave?’ and ordered a younger female officer to write us a ticket. I could see she didn’t want to do it because she was watching us the whole time but she wrote it anyway.”
The Ammons were given a ticket for $2,000 and ordered to turn around and leave the PBR. They subsequently spent two additional hours in traffic before getting to the hospital, where Dr Sherene Kalloo quickly began assessing the baby’s condition.
“The scans showed the baby’s heartbeat was erratically high and it was not regulating. We were told we had to do an emergency C-section or risk having a stillborn,” Laban-Ammon said.
Thankfully, her son Armani was eventually delivered healthy but the mother of two said her husband now intended to contest the ticket in court.
“Why didn’t the police have some compassion or sympathy? My baby could have died because of the stress and the long wait to get to the hospital and the officer treated us so badly,” she added. She said she and her husband had not planned a C-section.
“We were not catering for that cost. We had saved up money to have a natural birth but this procedure is like three times the cost that we now have to come up with,” she said.
She is also adamant that the C-section could have been avoided if the officer had allowed them to use the PBR.
“If he had a little bit of understanding, me and my baby would not have had to go through all of this. I had a healthy pregnancy with no complications at that point,” she said.
Cop can use discretion
In an immediate response to queries yesterday, Works and Transport Minister Fitzgerald Hinds said a police officer in uniform did have the discretion to allow a person who did not have a PBR pass to use it in the case of an emergency.
However, Hinds said it was still up to the officer at that time to make that decision. He added: “The policy is that only authorised vehicles, largely those used for public transport and a few others, are permitted to use the bus route.
“That permission is conveyed with the allocation of a PBR pass. In the absence of that pass, no one is allowed to use the bus route, regardless of the circumstances.
“But a police officer in uniform acting under the rule of general law has the lawful authority to direct a motorist to use any roadway in any manner at any time.
“So if a police officer instructs you to drive up a one-way street, you are duty-bound to comply. And therefore if a police officer authorises you to use the PBR, then the user has reasonable excuse for using it.”
While he said he could not comment on the specifics of this case, Hinds said the officer may not have been satisfied that the case was a genuine emergency.
“It may very well be that the police officer was not so satisfied that her condition was genuine. It seems from the reports so far that the officer was not persuaded that her report was valid,” he said.
He said while he did not have the competency to judge this matter, he felt it was necessary to bring clarity to the issue as it could arise again in other situations.
Also contacted on the matter, public information officer of the TTPS, Michael Pierre, confirmed that in circumstances such as last Monday’s, police could use their discretion to allow people to drive on the PBR.
But he said having heard only one side of the story, he could not say whether the officer should have dealt with the situation differently.