For around 40 years, if not more, a plan to remove the traffic jam that envelops the centre of Attard every morning has been sitting on the planners’ desks.

Now it has been retrieved and looks like being put in motion. And all hell has broken loose.

The concept is to create a bypass like the many which have alleviated traffic in many towns and villages, from Mosta to Qrendi, to name just two.

But NIMBY has struck again. NIMBY stands for Not In My Back Yard, only in this case one would probably be more exact to say Not In My Front Garden.

The residents of a street which would be turned from a quiet road with no traffic at all and facing a ODZ area are understandably up in arms when they imagine their quiet road turned to a highway with fumes, noise and even danger coming in. So they are opposing the proposal.

But in such a case, the needs of the wider community must take precedence. The wider community has been forced to queue morning after morning until the traffic gets through the narrow bend in the road. The morning traffic jam spreads through the other streets of Attard, up to the residence of the American Ambassador with all the mayhem that queuing during the rush hour involves.

Things then get worse when it’s raining and more people use cars. Until a few years back, rain turned the streets into rivers but that has now been addressed.

People have always been asking why is it that other villages and towns  have seen a bypass alleviate traffic in the village core but this apparently is not possible at Attard. Now they know there is a silent and hard-working lobby blocking the idea and probably terrorizing any government who tried to do something. And politicians, being politicians, always succumb to the threats of votes at the next election.

The people who would be affected by the bypass have come up with all sorts of novel ideas how to alleviate traffic jams without having recourse to a bypass, but the suggestions they made, including a tunnel, are ludicrous and impracticable.

Yes, maybe we do have a preference for roundabouts and bypasses but in the immediate creating a bypass is cheaper, quicker and affordable in the short term.

It is inconceivable in this day and age that a minority, and a hidden one at that, can block the needs of the majority. It is inconceivable that people have to waste time and fuel queuing when they could have an easier start to the day.

Our advice to the government and the ministry of transport is thus to get on with it and to start the preparatory works that will bring relief to so many drivers, and even to the Attard drivers themselves.