As the citizens of Malta head for the beaches and enjoy their annual shut-down holidays, and as the roads get congested in some places and mercifully free in others, it would perhaps be useful to ponder on the ever-increasing problem of congestion on our roads.

For this is a country that is slowly choking itself with totally impassable roads, due to the heavy (and increasing) usage and the rising number of cars on the roads.

On the one hand, it is true, we are making our roads better, a pleasure to drive on, and we may, in the coming years, come close to unravelling some of the bottlenecks that successive short-sighted administrations have created.

But that only scratches the surface of things. There is only one way to bring some sort of sanity as regards car usage and that is through the creation of a truly effective public transport system. Yet successive administrations have fought shy of tackling this Herculean task.

Once someone really studies this issue, many unknown facts come to light. It will become evident that Malta’s real aristocracy does not consist of the workers at the dockyard, nor the civil servants, or the port workers. The top-drawer aristocracy in Malta are the bus drivers.

Consider this: which one of us can claim that it is the government’s duty to fork out the money to be my working capital? Not you or me, but the bus drivers can and do it, and surprise, surprise, they get away with it.

And they also get away with working every other day, thus using this bus, one day on and one day off. In other words, the government forks out the working capital but this is “used” only half the time.

But wait, there’s more. The government, which subsidises the bus and the whole operation, does not even have the right to suggest, propose and finally impose the creation of new bus routes. For, according to an agreement signed in 1995, which must have been signed by a government sick with terminal dementia, it does not even have an end date, by which time a new agreement must be negotiated, an agreement which gives bus drivers a real cens perpetwu (perpetual lease) over Maltese roads, if the government or somebody were to suggest and demand the opening of a new route, they must finance it from top to bottom. It is as if the government has to lease a bus to make a daily run to the new hospital, for instance. The government does not even have the right to order the opening of a new route: on the contrary, the bus drivers can reject this proposal or, they can get the government to pay for the opening of this new route.

Forget this is a business. This looks more like daylight robbery. And the supposedly strong government time and again proves to be weak-kneed and stops short of doing what it is there to do: govern.

It is for this reason that people in outlying areas do not have buses that provide them with a service serve. This is why there are very few links between the different areas of Malta that do not pass through the over-congested Valletta terminus. It is for this reason that stupidly, as the government is trying to revive Valletta in the evening, the buses almost all stop at suppertime.

And now, right in the line of so many demented decisions taken by successive governments, we have even had our own minister of transport who fought to convince the EU to reject a coming EU directive, which says that governments must award public transport contracts by tender, just as happened at the ports. Minister Jesmond Mugliett was outvoted at the EU Council for Transport Ministers. He also insisted that the timing of the transitional periods be lengthened, as well as the duration of the contracts

Thank heavens for that! That is precisely why we voted to become EU members: so that we are at least saved from the shortsightedness of our politicians by Brussels.