For the past weeks now, those who have to pass from the South of the island to the North or vice-versa have had to endure long queues, dust, disruption and whatnot if they passed through the Regional Road outside the Sta Venera tunnels.

It has not been a pleasurable experience. It is no joke first of all to endure a long queue under the tunnel, then to find yourself funneled to a single lane and then, when you think it's over, to find yourself pushed to a lane you never used before, while on each side huge machines churn up the road and cloak everything in black dust. It gets even worse when darkness falls even though there are floodlights to show the way.

This is everything a road should not be. A road should be a pleasant ride, making driving easy, helping the drivers avoid mistakes and dangerous driving.

In fact, one of the complaints most visitors make about Malta's roads is that they swerve when they should be straight and that they complicate the business of driving. It will take more than is being done at the Sta Venera end of the tunnel to turn the Regional Road into a road that is safe for drivers.

Every time we pass through it, we marvel at the short-sightedness of those who put in place. The central stretch, in Sta Venera, is now too narrow to take the volume of traffic. This becomes evident every time there is a slight accident. Those who planned the road, many years ago, never imagined there would be so much traffic. As it is now, it is impossible to double the tunnel, as should be done.

The central part has also become tatty and is showing its age. So one has to ask if the current works being done will really tackle the problems deep down.

This, we understand, is very different from the green sites when the roads at the northern end of the island were being upgraded some years ago. That was the easy bit. The hard bit is tackling the serious parts of the road network that have been rendered very decrepit by constant usage, as is being done.

So we have to endure the queues, the dust, the confusion, hoping the works will not take long to be concluded.

The work has been complicated by the fact that most services pass along these roads and may not have been laid on in the best way. Many times, successive governments skimp on works with the result that they make it harder on the governments that come after them and force them to do a radical upgrading by upending all that was done before and doing it all over again. Will we ever learn?