With low profits and dissatisfied passengers, who is coming out on top in Belize’s bus industry?
By André Habet, ClimateSpotlight.com – Sept. 8, 2025
Editor’s note: Some of the quotes in this article are in the Creole (Kriol) language.
To listen to an audio version of this article, use the audio player below, or listen to it on Mada Fyah’s YouTube channel.
GC had been riding the bus twice a day from Belmopan to Belize City and back for almost three months when she had an experience that would change her view of bus travel. A nurse by profession, GC didn’t imagine that she’d have to use her skills on her way to work, but that’s exactly what happened on June 25, 2025, on the 6 a.m. bus to Belize City. (GC asked that we not use her name).
Unlike her usual routine of sitting in the back to get some extra rest during her early morning commute, that day, GC happened to be awake at the front of the bus because of a talkative seatmate. Aware and alert, GC said that around 6:30 a.m., she noticed the bus drifting toward the center of the road.
“The driver was swerving for maybe a minute to three minutes max,” GC said. “I just saw him swerving on the road, and I noticed the conductor looking at him and glancing at him every few seconds.”
GC overheard the driver ask the conductor to pass him a sweet. This exchange struck GC because her medical expertise made her concerned that the driver’s sugar levels were dangerously low. She worried that the requested sweet was meant to alleviate his symptoms, allowing him to power through whatever he was experiencing and continue driving.
Seated directly behind the driver, GC leaned forward and asked him if he was ok. He didn’t respond.
Head nodding against his chest, GC says that the driver was initially resistant to stopping the bus.
“Let me check you,” she told the driver.
The conductor agreed: ”Yes, stop the bus so the nurse can check you,” GC recalled him saying.
The driver remained reluctant, so GC insisted. For reasons that are unclear, the clearly panicked conductor was unable to operate the bus, so another passenger took over and assisted the driver in pulling the bus off the highway. Transport officers at the Belize City terminal later confirmed that the incidents did indeed take place.
Once parked alongside the highway, GC and a medical doctor on board the bus attended to the driver. They noticed he had facial paralysis on his left side, a clear indicator that he was most likely experiencing a stroke.
The bus driver, who GC said was still giving instructions to the conductor as he was placed in the ambulance, was transferred to the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital. Bus terminal officers told me that it is quite common for bus companies to hire conductors who are not equipped or trained to take the wheel in case of an emergency.
GC’s experience was a rare near-miss avoided when an alert and qualified passenger noticed a problem. Of course, not every commuter’s story about the bus has a happy ending.
In the course of reporting for this article, I learned that Belizeans face a variety of safety problems when they board the nation’s buses, which operate through a patchwork system of private companies that transport people between neighborhoods, villages, and the entire country.
These companies, ranging from highly localized to nationwide operators, transport thousands of Belizeans every day with little enforcement of existing regulations from the police, Department of Transport, or municipal traffic departments. This, despite an investment of USD 342,000 “to the Traffic Departments of the municipalities, the Police and the Transport Departments to improve understanding of best practices in the various aspects of traffic law enforcement,” according to a 2022 Caribbean Development Bank (CBD) report on the First Belize Road Safety Project that ran between 2013 and 2019.
This amount doesn’t account for further enforcement training investments made during the Second Belize Road Safety project from 2019 to 2024, for which CBD has yet to publish its project completion validation report.
Bargain Travel, Unknown Risks
Despite the litany of issues commuters face with the bus, one undeniable fact is that, whether for interdistrict, rural, or municipal travel, the cost can’t be beat.
A ticket from Belize City to Belmopan costs between $6 and $9. Traveling the length of the country from Corozal Town to Punta Gorda, which requires a transfer in Belize City or Belmopan, costs about $45. At the municipal level, the UNDP-funded e-mobility bus pilot launched last summer by the Belize City Council charges $3 for regular commuters to any stop along its route, and city “dolla vans” charge $2, versus an average $10 cab fare.
In the absence of a unified scheduling system for the nation’s buslines, Constantine Enriquez, an IT specialist, developed an app to fill the void. He said that despite owning a car, he still takes the bus three times a week from his home in Vista Del Mar to the Neil Gordon Gym near Pound Yard.
Comparing the cost of driving his car versus taking the bus, Enriquez said: “Instead of having to spend maybe $15 or 20 on gas, I just pay $2 [one way].”
When it comes to the rate and severity of bus collisions or other incidents that lead to passenger injury or death, the numbers are unclear. Using the Freedom of Information Act in May this year, I requested the raw data for “The annual number of bus versus bus, car, or road vehicle-related accidents, collisions, and other incidents in which driver and/or passenger safety was imperiled” for 2020-2025.
However, as of publication, I have not received any response from the Department or the Ministry of Transport, with the request currently pending investigation at the Office of the Ombudsman.
Without government data, what we are left to rely on are individual accounts and news reports, which together paint a harrowing picture of incidents involving buses over the past year: buses spontaneously combusting, overturning with passengers–including children–aboard, and collisions resulting in fatalities in broad daylight.
Between August 2024 and August 2025, Belizean news media reported at least five incidents involving buses that resulted in either passenger injury or death. One incident resulted in a bus overturning, injuring over thirty people. Two concerned a collision between a bus and a pedestrian–including 16-year-old Hattieville resident Terell Cardines, who was riding a bicycle when he was hit by a 20-year-old driving a Floralia bus. Most recently, on August 30, a bus collided with two people on a motorcycle in Corozal, resulting in their deaths.
Five may seem an insignificant number for those not directly impacted by the loss of loved ones or the time needed to recover from injury, yet broader trends in national road safety indicate that the number of injurious incidents related to buses is likely higher.
A 2023 Inter-American Development Bank report on road safety in Latin America and the Caribbean, citing data from the World Bank, said that Belize has a higher-than-average rate of road fatalities for the region, despite the two road safety projects over the past ten years.
As reported by the news media, accident survivors, ministry officials, and police investigators point to a host of causes for safety lapses. They include, but are not limited to:
- mechanical failure, such as worn tires and faulty electrical issues
- operator error, including speeding, illegal overtaking, and distracted driving
- a lack of road markings, including signs, and visible dividing lines
- road and highway erosion and poor upkeep
The rate of injury or fatality for passengers or drivers of buses is also hard to determine since the exact number of bus operators active in Belize is not publicly available, with no such information listed on the Department of Transport’s threadbare website.
According to the president of the Belize Bus Association, Thomas Shaw, there are as many as 300 bus operators in the country, 31 of which are members of BBA. Meanwhile, research for this story produced a list of 70 bus operators, many of which have no publicly listed information beyond a Facebook page, and 31 of those operate “village” buses in Toledo, based on information collected via Facebook and the Toledo information desk of the Belize Tourism Industry Association.
It’s also unclear how many people use the nation’s buses. Figures of bus ridership for highway and village buses are recorded by terminal unit staff, but are not publicly available. While most bus models accommodate anywhere between 45 to 66 seated passengers, it’s unclear whether ridership figures are collected in aggregate by the Department of Transport or its Ministry, though the ministry’s 2024/2025 key programme goal of developing ‘a national database of public transport records’ suggests that it is in development.
Regardless, that number is unlikely to take into consideration “standees,” passengers who pay a fare to ride the buses when over capacity and may not get a seat for the duration of their trip, one of the most common violations practiced by bus operators.
Only the Belize City Council’s UNDP-funded E-Mobility project was able to share ridership figures, which are electronically recorded by conductors through their point of sales system. Belize City Council E-mobility project coordinator Neil Hall said that since May of this year, the two 22-seater e-buses combined have had at least 16,000 passengers a month, representing a quarter of the city’s 64,000 population.
With a national population of less than half a million, Shaw believes that the demand for buses is relatively low for the region and therefore doesn’t provide sufficient profit for operators to reinvest and improve their fleets and train personnel. Still, across various interviews with passengers, several lamented the lack of enough buses to accommodate their travel schedules, among other issues.
“Not that bad, not that good, but it can be better”
On a Monday morning in July, I arrived at the Belmopan terminal after visiting family in Belize City. The ride aboard the Westline bus had been harrowing: A tire blew out near the zoo, and the bus kept on driving to the capital.
When we arrived at the terminal, a replacement bus was waiting to transfer passengers continuing west, while a surge of other people at the terminal attempted to board the new bus, which was already near full capacity with its original group of riders.
Bryann Griffith, who regularly commutes for work, was among the passengers unable to board the bus heading to Cayo.
“I am from Boom, so I usually would catch the Enriques bus and then catch the Westline to Cayo,” she said. “But this morning the Enriques bus had some mechanical issues, so that didn’t run. I ended up having to come to Hattieville, and I was there for an hour and hitched a ride to the terminal. I’m still waiting for the bus [to work].”
That morning’s delay was not an isolated incident for Griffith.
“There are instances where the bus breaks down, and then you’re left on the road for hours waiting. My first day on my current job, I was there waiting for a bus until after nine, so I made it to my first day like almost 11 that morning, and I was out there from 6 am.”
Travel delays like the ones Griffith has experienced were one of the most frequent complaints among passengers interviewed for this article–passengers who feel like they have little choice in the matter of transportation to go to work, school, and other obligations.
My first day on my current job, I was there waiting for a bus until after nine, so I made it to my first day like almost 11 that morning, and I was out there from 6 am.”
—Bryann Griffith, frequent bus passenger
A passenger at the terminal who did not share his name observed:
“There are high times when there’s a lot of people here, and there’s one bus scheduled. The buses could make adjustments when they know it’s gonna be a lot of people here.”
Even getting information about the schedule can prove a challenge, with one passenger reporting two instances of being shouted at by a terminal officer or ticket agent upon requesting schedule information.
Speeding was another concern for some passengers. One stated that some drivers “have to take their time when driving.”
Passengers also expressed frustration with the current ticketing system.
“Sometimes you buy a ticket and you still noh get to sit on the bus,” said another passenger at the Belmopan terminal. Such experiences with ticketing are more than a minor annoyance for some passengers.
President of the Belize Assembly for People with Diverse Abilities, Francisco Cuellar, stated that the entire bus experience is inaccessible for disabled persons despite the passage of the Disabilities Act in December 2024, which legislated for increased accessibility for public transportation and buildings, among eight central measures.
Asked what improvements had been made in regards to accessibility of either public transportation or buildings, Cuellar replied, “absolutely nothing,” and expressed his disappointment with the government’s lack of action.
Carmelita Guerra, who lives in Belmopan and travels monthly to Punta Gorda to visit her daughter, said that for herself as a disabled person with chronic bone and joint weakness, taking the bus is a taxing process that has resulted in injury for her on three separate occasions.
To start, Guerra says, “You have to reach there like an hour early just to get in line to buy a ticket.”
The difficulty continues at boarding.
“When they open the gates, it’s very chaotic. Sometimes you get stampeded, you get pushed, you get shoved. Sometimes they don’t open the gate completely, so you can get injured, and then you have to fight your way to get on the bus.”
Even once on the bus, Guerra is sometimes unable to get a seat for much of the five-hour trip. The strain is so severe that Guerra often finds herself exhausted the following day.
Still, some commuters at the Belmopan bus terminal were positive in their views of the existing bus service, noting the price of the bus as unbeatable for getting around the country. Several considered the current standards to be expected for Belize, with one passenger saying he didn’t think there was any room for improvement with the bus service, “given the circumstances in which our country is third-tier.”
As another passenger put it, the bus experience in Belize is “not that bad, not that good, but it can be better.”
With these personal experiences in mind, I wanted to see what patterns emerged in the daily life of commuters. The following results, though probably unsurprising for regular commuters, reinforced passengers’ accounts of overcrowded buses, incidents of speeding, and highly distracted driving that all run the risk of injury to passengers.
Two Weeks in the Lives of Bus Commuters
The Motor Vehicle and Road Safety Act empowers the Ministry of Transport to make regulations “as regards motor omnibuses and freight passenger vehicles.” Most regulations listed in the Act concern the number of buses, their routes, and the issuance of road service permits. Those regulations are overseen by the Department of Transport.
On a day-to-day basis, it’s up to terminal officers, municipal traffic departments, and highway patrol to ensure that regulations are being followed by bus operators. Joel Armstrong, owner of Armstrong Bus Line in Orange Walk, says that this primarily takes the form of inspections that happen regularly at terminals, which check for equipment such as spare tires and fire extinguishers, among other requirements.
To get first-hand accounts of bus rides along various routes, I hired two people who take the bus Monday through Friday for their jobs. These field agents recorded their bus experiences as they travelled twice a day: One from Belize City to their workplace at Mile 30 on the George Price Highway, and the other from Belize City to Crooked Tree. They filed daily reports sharing their experiences and observations, including any driving violations, and used cameras to corroborate their reports.
Although a limited sample, the reports and footage reveal a pattern of overcrowding in the morning and evening along both highways. Across the 36 trips the field agents recorded, half of the trips included people standing in the aisles due to overcrowding. It would get so overcrowded that one agent told me in their debrief that “people would go all the way to the door.”
The field agents also observed repeated incidents of distracted driving. One field agent’s July 28 report stated that in one instance, the driver narrowly evaded an incoming vehicle because he was looking at his phone.
When asked to rate the overall severity of each trip’s safety violations, the field agents reported that they experienced no safety issues for more than half of their bus rides (as seen in the chart below).
For rides rated two (for moderate issues), the field agents reported incidents of speeding, overcrowding beyond safe capacity, or illegal overtaking that felt unsafe. In one instance, the field agent wrote, “Bus was driving way too fast on the curves by mile 21-22 that you could feel the bus leaning on the side.”
In their debrief interviews, both field agents shared that the experience was eye-opening for them. They were previously unaware of the extent of regulations that buses are supposed to operate by. When asked what changes should be made to improve the bus system, one field agent recommended that bus operators receive annual “driving lessons on how to drive buses on the highway.” The other agent stated that “a bus driver should be driving not only for himself, but for everyone on the bus.”
Of course, while the experience of riding the bus is familiar to many, the work and stress of managing a bus company is unknown to most Belizeans.
The (Brief) Reign and Fall of Novelo’s
The Minister of Transport, Dr. Louis Zabaneh, is exploring the development of a National Bus Company, in which participating bus operators would receive a stake commensurate with the value of their current bus company assets.
It’s an idea that Zabaneh believes can lead to substantive improvements for the industry.
However, for Belizean bus pioneers, there’s nothing novel about the idea. In the words of Sylvestre Mesh of Mesh Bus Line in Cayo, “ We have faced this experience before with Novelo’s, and then in the long run it collapsed, and it never did work.”
Mesh is referring to the period in the late 1990s and early 2000s when Novelo’s held a monopoly on several of the most coveted bus routes in Belize following a series of competitor buyouts through, among other sources, a $30,000,000 loan from the Development Finance Corporation (DFC).
At that time, competitors of Novelo’s included other operators that have also since vanished from roadways. Reflecting on the period when Novelo’s took over much of the industry, Shaw stated, “Novelo’s bought over Zabaneh [Z-line, a bus operator which Minister Zabaneh once ran], bought out Urbina, bought out Gilharry, bought out Batty’s. And they were pioneers in this business, right? Novelo’s thought that by owning everything, that would’ve been better for them. It got worse.”
The day Novelo’s went into receivership, March 5, 2004, it issued a press release stating:
“Novelo’s finds this debt to be unpayable given the high interest rates, high operational costs, and the fierce cut-throat competition in the transport business.”
The current bus system, therefore, emerged after the dissolution of Novelo’s and the redistribution of its road service permits among operators that remained or arose in the wake of its end. Before then, assigned seating was the norm in the industry, a standard operating procedure that the Department of Transport recently tasked bus operators with reviving by August 15, 2025, though implementation has been minimal, with one bus ticket agent stating, ‘A lot supposed to happen that doesn’t,’ when I asked him about it on August 30.
In short, the bus industry has experienced massive upheaval over the last few decades, which several operators have weathered and come through. Yet, those operators still working that I spoke to for this story shared how the financial pressures are now worse than ever, with one operator questioning whether they’ll be able to continue in the industry much longer.
High Interest Rates, High Operational Costs: A Cutthroat Business
Across my interviews with the three bus operators–Thomas Shaw, Joel Armstrong, and Sylvestre Mesh–one throughline that came across was the increased difficulty that operators are having making a substantive profit in the industry. With slimmer profit margins, operators are hard-pressed to find capital to invest in maintaining and improving their fleets.
As Shaw put it: “You cannot determine what you’re going to make. It fluctuates. The way our buses are running right now, you find out that no buses are running at a hundred percent capacity.”
This unpredictability in passenger numbers, in the view of operators, makes it difficult for them to ascertain what their monthly income will be after expenses, which are extensive in instances where operators are maintaining their fleet and company in working order.
For instance, to maintain good standing with the Department of Transport, bus operators must ensure they are fulfilling the terms of their road service permits, meaning that they are providing timely and reliable transportation for the runs they are scheduled for.
This, in turn, exacerbates speeding, one of the biggest concerns for passengers I spoke to, since drivers often compensate for any delays in their trip by exceeding the speed limit in various instances.
Armstrong stated that, “From Pallotti [High School] to [Burrell] Boom cutoff sometimes could take an hour and a half.” (It’s typically a 30 to 40-minute drive by car). “You consume a lot of fuel,” he said. “You better have a good radiator or else your bus will run hot. That causes wear. At the same time, that causes danger.”
That danger then takes the form of bus drivers exceeding 75 mph, according to Armstrong, at various stretches of the Philip Goldson Highway. Armstrong added that some passengers prefer buses at these speeds to arrive at their destinations more quickly, which provides further incentive to bus operators to exceed safe speed limits.
In addition to navigating competitive roadways, bus operators must also keep their buses in working order, a feat that requires continuous capital investment. Mesh said, “You have to pay the driver, pay the conductor, pay tax to the government, license, social security, and apart from that, the maintenance of the bus.”
Then there is insurance. In addition to the usual liability insurance, buses should also pay passenger liability insurance, which further drives up the total cost.
To illustrate, Armstrong used the following example. “My school bus, the regular liability insurance is BZD $400 for the whole year. With the passenger liability insurance, it comes out to almost BZD $3,000 a year.” ORINCO, the association representing Belizean insurance companies, did not reply to questions concerning member organizations’ policies with bus operators as of publication.
Some of the most costly maintenance expenses for bus operators are tires, which all operators agreed should be changed every six months on average. Armstrong and Shaw reported spending around BZD $5,400 and $4,800, respectively, on new tires twice a year per bus. Caribbean Tires sells 11R24.5 tires, the size used by larger buses, for an average of BZD $641.25 each.
Illustrating the high cost of bus parts, Joel Disus, an Orange Walk-based bus mechanic for operators like Silvas Bus Line, stated, “If you go buy one injector, one sensor, it comes out $400 to $600. The parts are not cheap.”
Additionally, the cost of parts doesn’t account for any diagnostics or mechanical labor, which in and of themselves can be prohibitively expensive if operators lack the skill or capacity to make most repairs themselves, something to which the three operators all attested to doing, each recounting how they regularly work through the night into the early morning making repairs just to then get back on the road.
Armstrong estimates that maintaining a bus in good condition takes $15 to BZD$16,000 a year, with just a bucket of oil costing $385.00, which has to be changed every two months in dry weather conditions.
Of course, all those numbers pale in comparison to the biggest expense bus operators face: fuel.
In separate conversations, Shaw and Mesh stated, “Fuel is a killer,” when asked what makes it difficult for operators to make a substantive profit. The data bear out this perspective. Since late 2020, the price of diesel has risen considerably faster than bus fares—about 15 times faster, according to inflation data from the Statistical Institute of Belize. Imagine one kid growing a foot in a year while the other only grows an inch. That’s the difference in their compounded growth.
Fuel is a killer
Thomas Shaw and Sylvestre Mesh when asked what makes it difficult for
operators to make a substantive profit.
Most of Belize’s buses run on diesel fuel, which costs about $11.42 a gallon as of June 2025, according to SIB. Meanwhile, the government has never provided bus operators with fuel subsidies except for a limited-term fuel subsidy of $0.91 per gallon for eligible bus operators in 2022 (during the COVID-19 pandemic) for a promised six months, which Mesh says in practice, “was a couple days and that gaan.” Several email requests for interviews with Minister Zabaneh, CEO Williams, and the Chief and Deputy Transport Officers did not receive a reply at the time of publication.
Today, the high cost of fuel is making it even more challenging for many bus operators to generate a profit and keep up with necessary repairs and maintenance. Upgrading the buses themselves, many of which date to the 1990s, may be completely out of the question.
The buses themselves run the gamut in terms of cost. At the time of our interview in June, Mesh shared that his brother had just bought a 2008 Bluebird bus for $38,000 locally, a model that he believed could’ve been landed for $35,000 if imported from the United States, as most of his buses have been since he brought in two Gilly Buses in 1985 after taking over the family business from his father.
To afford all these various expenses, bus operators often find themselves in a cycle of debt. On his relationship to maintaining his buses, Mesh stated, “The buses, they are more like my wife. I stay without any money. I invest in my bus because that is my livelihood.”
Put less romantically, Armstrong said,“ Once you in the bus business, you have to owe a bank, DFC, or maybe even the person who brings down the bus for you from abroad. You have to inna big debt in order to have a good bus.”
These varied expenses and the tight financial regulations of the industry have created an untenable situation for operators who own fewer than three buses. They find themselves under extreme pressure at all times to keep their fleets in working order to maintain their road service permits, which can in and of themselves become highly politicized and subject to cronyism.
Mesh said, “Sometimes politicians want to take away your service, and they want to give it to your competitors even though you are pioneers in your business.”
So why run a bus company? It was clear from my interviews with the bus operators that they love the work that they do and the service they provide to their communities. Each operator spoke fondly of their entry into the industry, how they learned to drive a bus from a parent or an elder at a young age, and how much they appreciated the contribution they made to people’s lives.
Speaking to me at his home near Tower Hill, Armstrong said he views his work as community service, providing free rides for the elderly and other passengers at times. He said he worries this could be lost in the transition to the proposed National Bus Company and the standardization that might come with it.
Armstrong said he’s planning his exit strategy from the industry now that he’s in his fifties and the stress of the job has begun to impact his health.
Armstrong told me he sees no signs of an upswing for his bus line, even after investing most of his earnings into his buses. To date, he said, operating a bus company has not delivered the markers of financial success he aspired to, such as building a cement house for his family, having savings in the bank, and buying a personal vehicle for family outings.
‘Novelo’s 2.0’ And Other Solutions
Passengers, experts, and bus operators interviewed for this story agree that a substantive overhaul of Belize’s bus system is overdue to ensure operators can secure sustainable profits and passengers can access safe and reliable public transportation.
When it comes to improving passengers’ safety, one of the more obvious solutions is to require more specialized driver training for bus drivers. Currently, driving tests for buses don’t have a specialized curriculum mandated by the Department of Transport, meaning that training is largely left up to individual bus operators’ discretion.
Ritchie Bardalez, a driving instructor based in Punta Gorda, has been teaching people how to drive private vehicles since 2023. In 2024, James Bus Line, also based in Punta Gorda, hired Bardalez to teach 20 drivers and 25 conductors. His course comprises 22 multi-hour sessions that cover developing a proactive safety attitude, recognizing and anticipating hazards, and courtesy in communication with passengers. A representative from James could not be reached to comment on the impact of this course on driver performance.
Another option to improve driver safety and vehicle performance may be to hire more women as drivers. Yesi Armstrong, Joel Armstrong’s wife, is one of the only women bus drivers in Belize. The pair agreed that from their experience, buses driven by Yesi tended to require less frequent part replacements than those driven by their son, who, Yesi said, “changes his brakes every month.” In Yesi’s view, in addition to tight bus schedules, male drivers also speed because “They want to look better than the other bus drivers.”
Regional interest in increasing women bus drivers was expressed by Ana María Pinto, the Chief of the Transport Division at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and first author of IDB’s regional road safety report. In an email, Pinto said, “women remain underrepresented in the transport sector in Latin America, where they make up just 8.8% of the workforce and only 21% of leadership roles.”
Barriers to entry for women to the bus industry are numerous, and Pinto wrote that one reason for the gendered discrepancy is caregiving, “as women dedicate on average 38 hours per week to unpaid care, compared to 16 for men.” Yesi Armstrong put it more bluntly in her comments, stating that for more women to enter the bus industry, “First, men’s machismo needs to change.”
As for more reliable schedules, that might be closer than Belizeans might have dared to dream a few months ago. On July 1, CEO Williams made his regularly scheduled 7 News appearance to show off some new cushioned seating at the Novelo’s Bus Terminal as well as a television that displays the schedule for passengers transiting through the terminal.
However, on my first visit to the terminal since its installation, the television was initially off. I spoke to a terminal agent who then turned it on, and noticed that the schedule displayed only the Monday to Friday schedule, which a senior terminal officer said is not updated to reflect weekends and holidays.
Constantine Enriquez’s online bus schedule appears to be the most developed as far as nationwide usability. Enriquez populated the schedule by aggregating schedules from Belmopan online and individual bus operators’ websites and Facebook pages after an initial request for the bus schedules from DoT went unfulfilled. Still, Enriquez said, the schedules from operators often listed times that no longer corresponded with current bus runs.
Asked what need his app fills, Enriquez replied: “Trying to take the bus is a bit of a skill,” and that by providing a schedule, he was looking to reduce that barrier for commuters, especially tourists who are even more unfamiliar with routes, fares, and bus operators. Another alternative low-cost solution to improving bus schedules would be to change the culture around ‘regular’ buses and their frequency of stops.
Rather than stopping “at every lamppost,” as Joel Armstrong put it, bus operators and the Transport Board can work together to determine dedicated bus stops along every major route, leaving it up to commuters to meet the bus in those places rather than picking people up every few feet within long village routes. This changed approach to bus stops is one of the central features of CITCO’s e-mobility pilot, which Hall says has been able to use a data-driven approach to adding and eliminating stops to keep the buses on schedule.
One potential solution to increasing profits for bus operators is to raise bus fares to compensate for increases in fuel costs over the past several years. Currently, fares are set by the Transport Board according to the Motor Vehicle and Road Safety Act, and operators are not allowed to change them without first requesting approval from the Board.
After northern bus operators tried to increase their bus fares in late July, Deputy Chief Transport Officer Peter Williams told Love FM:
“Bus operators cannot, on a whim, decide whether or not they want to increase their bus fares. It’s actually an offense for persons who operate buses and charge higher rates than what is prescribed by law.”
In media appearances over the last few months, Minister Zabaneh and CEO Williams have repeatedly emphasized the maintenance of existing bus fares under their regime.
Another option to increase bus operators’ profitability is to expand the use of electric buses. That possibility is now being explored through a UNDP-supported pilot that will be carried out by Westline following a bidding process that the BBA criticized as opaque.
Still, speaking to Hall about the municipal e-mobility project, the gap between the internal combustion engine energy cost and the e-buses is undeniable. Hall puts it, “The energy bill for the electric bus is approximately BZD$3,000 per month. With a regular diesel bus, they use close to BZD$300 a day in fuel.”
“The energy bill for the electric bus is approximately $3,000 per month. With a regular diesel bus, they use close to $300 a day in fuel.”
Neil Hall, Belize City Council E-mobility project coordinator
One of the biggest obstacles to expanding e-bus use on Belize’s highways will be maintaining the buses’ electrical charges, as most of the existing charging stations throughout the country take several hours to fully recharge vehicles, and e-buses require more regular charges when at full occupancy, never mind potential standees.
Pinto of IDB said that her organization also views e-transit as an important component of improving regional bus fleets, writing that, “By 2030, demand is expected to exceed 24,000 electric buses across 32 major cities, about 30% of the fleet.”
Of course, the biggest proposed solution to the bus industry’s woes is an overhaul of the highway bus system through the formation of the aforementioned National Bus Company (NBC), spearheaded by the Ministry of Transport and Minister Dr. Louis Zabaneh. This public-private partnership promises to provide riders with a better bus experience while providing low-interest financing opportunities to partnering operators to replace their existing fleet with Hyundai models.
Despite reservations, some bus operators like Armstrong have publicly expressed their interest in joining the NBC.
However, for some operators, the partnership idea seems half-baked. In a June 24, 2025, letter to Zabaneh, the BBA expressed concern about the lack of detail in the proposal, stating:
“Commuters across Belize are now being promised a first-class, digital, modern transport experience. It sounds wonderful. But where is the math?”
This skepticism, BBA said, is due to a lack of detailed information about the partnership’s financial viability, as well as previous occasions when the Ministry of Transport had developed fleet upgrade agreements with bus operators.
According to Shaw, “Under Rodwell Ferguson [Minister of Transport, 2020-2025], operators went out there and ate a tremendous investment in purchasing newer buses. Now there’s another minister [Zabaneh]; they moved the goal post. And what the operators are fearful of is if you give me BZD$60,000 [in valuation], I owe the bank BZD$150,000, how would I repay my mortgage?”
That concern with the outcome of the bus audit process hangs over the heads of operators like Armstrong, who is hoping for a favorable valuation that will facilitate his exit from the bus industry.
Armstrong said his plan is “to sell to the government. Hopefully, I get a good evaluation. Outta dat money, I have to compensate my son, my wife, and with what’s left, buy a lee vehicle and chop yard.”
These concerns prompted one UDP representative, Godwin Haylock, to refer to the NBC as “Novelo’s 2.0. Only this time, the government wants to be the partner in control of the monopoly.”
In comments published by Amandala about the proposed National Bus Company in July, Zabaneh said there were 22 bus operators who had signed up to the auditing process to evaluate their companies.
When asked about best practices for public-private partnerships like the NBC, Pinto offered the following:
“PPPs or concessions—require well-structured contracts that allocate risks to the parties best positioned to manage them. A key example is the separation between the fleet provision contract and the operation and maintenance contract. This contractual distinction enables targeted subsidies for fleet acquisition while transferring procurement and warranty risks to the private sector. Meanwhile, operational and maintenance costs can be largely recovered through user fares.”
Whether the Ministry decides to heed this advice will be determined in January 2026, when the NBC plans to launch.
On September 8, I checked in with Joel Armstrong on the status of the audits, originally scheduled for July and August. Armstrong shared that those are now at a standstill. This follows the August 28 outcome of Serrano’s Bus Service’s successful suit against the Department of Transport for refusing to renew its road service permits, thus violating the company’s constitutional rights. Serrano’s was awarded BZD$60,000 plus costs.
Uncertain Near Future
While the solutions appear to be abundant, it remains unclear how committed the government is to more broadly improving road safety and public transportation, as neither issue is mentioned in Plan Belize’s Medium Term Development Strategy. And while the Ministry of Transport’s key programme strategies for 2025/26 include “Aligning departmental goals with the Belize Medium Term Development Strategy,” the national budget also shows no funds earmarked for ‘bus terminals,’ ‘public transportation reform,’ ‘fuel subsidy program,’ or ‘public transport reform’ for the current budget cycle.
Additionally, with the end of the second Belize Road Safety project in December 2024, it’s also unclear to what extent the current Department of Transport will prioritize road safety or the development of a road safety statutory body, one of the key pillars IDB identified as essential to improving national road safety.
For now, the prospects for better public transportation in Belize remain murky. And while they wait for changes, passengers will continue to take on the risk of a broken system with another bus bursting into flames with passengers aboard on August 25.
Since the incident on the bus, GC has changed her routine. She no longer naps on the bus, but stays awake to be vigilant and aware of the driver’s behavior.
“When I reflect on that day, there are a lot of things that could have gone horribly.” Now, GC makes it a point to sit closer to the front, reading her Bible, ready to spring into action should the unthinkable happen again.
“This reporting project was made possible through the support of Global Financial Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank focused on illicit financial flows, corruption, illicit trade, and money laundering, and was facilitated by the Belize Network of NGOs. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the supporting organizations or their partners.”
Research assistance and graphics by Evvie Lionheart of Emergent Phoenix.
All photos are the copyright of André Habet except where otherwise stated.
