If you - like plenty of city residents - have to travel on St Thomas Street during your daily commute then you probably noticed the traffic lights at the often busy corner with St Joseph Street.
And if you were caught in the morning or evening rush, then you also might have seen a severe blockage in that area. That's because the traffic lights are adjacent to two roundabouts - the Flag Monument, which is arguably the busiest in the city, and the smaller one at the junction of St Thomas Street and Freetown Road.
The placement of the traffic lights in proximity to these then impedes the flow of the vehicles coming around the roundabout, which could result in greater rush hour traffic jams. Today, we asked the Mayor about the rationale behind it.
Bernard Wagner, Mayor of Belize City
"It's all about safety, not only for the motorists, but the safety of our pedestrians and the safety of our children traversing and crossing that St Thomas Street intersection there, we have had so many incidents in that area and so while it is close to the roundabout it is all about timing, the timing of the lights and that is where we have the engineers and the technical people really studying the timing because you can't have vehicles coming from the Belcan Bridge area onto Freetown and turning in St Thomas and you have a bottleneck created there because it really impedes the apparatus of the roundabout. So it's about timing it pretty quickly so that the traffic continues to flow and we don't have a bottleneck created there so that's the technical part, our part is about safety."
"The main thing here is that we have had our children at risk crossing the streets, the motorists, some of them are very, they don't show any care for people that are walking on the streets, those that are on their bikes and so it is important that we put in the necessary systems to protect our children."
