Government will consider setting up a Taxi Commission to regulate the industry, Transport Minister Terry Lister told MPs.

And he revealed his Ministry is to conduct a study of Town Cut and cruise ship access in a bid to prevent the "dying away" of St. George as a tourist attraction.

On Friday, Mr. Lister gave the House of Assembly a detailed rundown of projects in the pipeline in his Transport Ministry during debate on the Throne Speech.

He said the regulation of the taxi industry had "always been a challenge" and that "the time may well have come for a Taxi Commission that just deals with the taxis".

"The people who serve on the Public Service Vehicles Licensing Board have always done a good job but they have a wide spectrum of what they have to regulate," said the Minister.

"We are going to see what could be done, how it should be regulated. We may go on a plane and go and look and see how they do it elsewhere."

Mr. Lister said "taxi ambassadors" were key to the Island's success as a vacation destination. "If the taxi driver is happy, he is only going to have happy thoughts and he's going to sell Bermuda positively.

"Our job now is to get 600 cabs moving every day, full of ambassadors speaking well and encouraging the tourists to come back."

The Minister said he had already talked with all the taxi dispatch companies and asked them to sit down together to "come up with a commonality" so he could focus on the issues that needed addressing.

On GPS, he said: "We will listen and we will hear what people have to say. But I have said to each of them: tell me what's wrong with GPS. They say all sorts of things but they don't make a coherent statement. 'I don't like GPS' isn't a good enough reason."

The Minister said Dockyard needed to be made more exciting for visitors and that he was concerned about the World Heritage Site of St. George.

"It's fantastic that we could have a World Heritage Site but I'm concerned about the dying away of that place."

Mr. Lister pledged: "My Ministry will conduct a study and we'll take a look at Town Cut. We'll look at it and try and work out what's the best way to look at that issue."

Other areas he was looking at, he said, were the bus service, including whether Government could afford environmentally-friendly hydro buses, and the possibility of Jet Blue increasing its flights to the Island.

He said his Ministry and other Ministries would study closely the Auditor General's recent special report on cost overruns on the new TCD building project to see what lessons could be learnt.

And he said recent "noise" about maintenance work on Government's fleet of fast ferries was "much ado about nothing".

"Those ferries are expected to last 20 years," he said. "They are not anywhere near that yet. There is also a resale market for the ferries. At some point, we may even consider that."