BEIRUT: Lebanon lacks one of the main features of a modern economy with its inefficient public transportation system, the president of Consumers Lebanon said Tuesday, criticizing the recent subsidy plan for taxi drivers amid rising gasoline prices.

“We can’t build a modern economy without efficient public services, primarily an organized transportation system,” Zuhair Berro told The Daily Star, criticizing Lebanon’s corrupt, unorganized transportation system.

“Technically, there hasn’t been a public transportation sector for 20 years now, what we have is a private sector protected by senior governmental official without publicly describing it as a private sector,” Berro said.

Berro’s comments came after Consumers Lebanon released a statement Tuesday asking the government to abolish the decision to subsidize taxi and truck drivers by LL470,000 and LL350,000 per month respectively.

Caertaker Finance Minister Raya al-Hasan, said the ministry will take out a loan to finance the subsidy, which many have described as a bribe to silence the uproar by public transport unions who had planned a strike set to have crippled transport throughout the country.

For Berro, subsidies would merely support a failing transportation system rather than create a better one.

“This sector has failed on all levels to secure affordable or organized transportation … It’s a source of pollution and it highly contributes to the problem of traffic in the country,” Berro said, adding that the sector was also corrupted as subsidized money was randomly delivered to union drivers.

Taxi driver subsidies over the next three months will amount to $49 million, money that Berro said is wasted and could have been invested into building a modern public transportation system.

“This large amount could be used in modernizing and helping the public transportation system as a whole to create an organized system,” Berro said.

Berro suggested that a long term plan would include the use of electricity and alternative energy by building a public transport system, which he said could decrease consumption costs by 50 percent.

In a separate development, labor union chiefs also decried the transportation subsidy, renewing demands that gasoline prices be capped at LL25,000 per tank.

Labor unions estimate that the subsidy’s cost will amount to $100 million.

Ghassan Ghosn of the General Labor Confederation questioned how Hasan was able to dish out so much cash, after having had declared the Finance Ministry’s cash registers empty just a few months before.

Ghosn called for the formation of a coherent gasoline policy, that would include placing price caps and reforming regulations on the oil import sector, which many believe to operate as a business cartel.

Caretaker Transport Minister Ghazi Aridi also received blame for the controversial gasoline subsidy.

“How can Minister Aridi accept that the Treasury spend more than $100 million on the private sector, while the public transport sector that should benefit everyone deteriorates?” said Maroun Khawli, president of the General Labor Confederation Union.