EU Commissioner, Violeta Bulc, heaped praise on Malta’s National Transport Strategy 2050 and the Transport Master Plan 2025, Transport Malta said in a statement. Commissioner Bulc congratulated minister Joe Mizzi for, such a “comprehensive work”, which is “long term”, has a “clear vision” and yet is “very operational”.
The Commission has carefully scrutinised all the documents submitted and approved Malta’s submission. Malta fulfilled all of its ex-ante conditionality requirements in the transport sector, and can thus access EU transport Funds budgeted until 2020. Ms. Bulc recommended that other ministers follow the pattern established by Malta to achieve a good balance between vision, long term planning, short term planning and execution.
Minister Mizzi presented the documents during a bilateral meeting in the presence of James Piscopo, Chairperson, CEO of Transport Malta and other officials. Minister Mizzi said, “The Master Plan and Strategy set out the country’s long term vision and a clear 10 year investment plan for the development of transport in Malta. National, EU and private-sector funding will now be guided by this plan to make our transport system more efficient, greener and safer. We took more than two years to formulate these documents, we had extensive consultations, took everyone’s views into consideration, eventually drawing up holistic documents with a good balance between effective current and future mobility, the environment and safety. We are delighted that the Master Plan is now also fully endorsed by the European Commission.”
Mr Piscopo stated that, “I am greatly satisfied that the energy put into these landmark documents by Transport Malta and various others, received the seal of approval by the European Commission. I am proud that our work is presented as a model for the rest of Europe. Most of all, I am honoured that Malta finally has a concrete plan for land, air and sea transport, a plan that, if followed, will greatly improve transport in Malta.”
This is the first time that Malta has a national comprehensive and action-oriented transport master plan, a plan that will guide policy makers to drop the customary short-term approach in solving transport issues and a strategy for coherent decisions within a wider frame work with studied outcomes.