The Nationalist Party has been reported as planning to announce a €2.3 billion programme that will run over four legislatures to create a metro system for Malta.

It is good that a political party presents its long-term proposals for an issue that is already quite bad and which will get worse as time goes by and as the number of cars on the inadequate roads continues to increase. Even today we may speak of gridlock on our roads.

Now some may say that a long-term strategy for the roads is not a matter for political or electoral debate. The crisis is there, the need is there. There must be no equivocation about it. On the other hand, politics means choices and indeed choices are all-important when it comes to the traffic situation.

Before we get enamoured about futuristic ideas about tunnels, metro lines etc, there are wider issues that must be tackled.

First of all where will the finances to do such a thorough change of our traffic patterns come from? We have used countless millions of EU funds to upgrade roads leading to the north. There was a reason: the EU funds could only be spent on what are called Ten-T roads which means what we call the Regional Road.

Somehow national funds for the rest of the roads remained roughly the same over time when the need for more funds was more than obvious. The delay to tackle this problem and the increasing pressure of traffic on our roads have now created a monster of a problem.

We must understand that without seriously increasing the amount of funds for our roads we risk making the problem more intractable than it is now.

Next we must prioritise. The experience of the Coast Road and the Kappara Junction upgrades teaches us that the country cannot take more than one big project at the same time.

It would seem, from the advance notice of this PN strategy, that the PN intends to change the current order of priorities. There is no harm in doing this – as long as what is being done today is not rendered useless tomorrow. We have already had three, not two, upgrading of the Coast Road in just a few years, when the money could have been spent better if proper planning was put in place.

Again – where in this list of priorities would we put the eventual tunnel between Gozo and Malta? It is still not too late to re-evaluate the whole idea considering that the latest studies seem to say the tunnel would need to emerge on the Malta side somewhere around Xemxija. On the other hand, Gozitans will probably rise up in anger at such a hint, seeing how they have been fobbed off with all kinds of promises and the attractive idea of driving into the tunnel at any time they want without all the hassles of queuing for the ship and then the crossing in all kinds of weather. The PN leader himself has often expressed himself in glowing terms in favour of the tunnel.

One new idea reportedly in the still to be published PN plan is a metro linking Malta’s towns and villages. This is not re-inventing the wheel: many cities around the world have repristined traffic and introduced a variant of a metro. In particular we must mention a city such as Strasbourg (a city Dr Busuttil must have come to know from his years at the European Parliament) which has a silent tram passing mostly on the surface in roads closed to the traffic which delivers customers quietly and efficiently around the city. This is just one example: there are many others.

Mostly, however, the current road network upgrade must continue. After the Kappara Junction, work must begin on the vexatious Addolorata Junction. And after that? We have one final suggestion: let us do away with all the traffic creating roundabouts and turn them into underpasses like, for instance, Brussels does. That is where the need for tunnels comes in.