One only has to stand back and reflect a moment, and then all the current criticism about road building in Malta appears very much in its true, clear light – very superficial and trite indeed.

One accepts these are pre-electoral times, so the Opposition is allowed some leeway in the targets it chooses and in what it says. And what better target than a bridge repair job that has taken twice as long as predicted? Or cost over-runs on some of the most recent road repair jobs? Or a minister let down by his inexperience in handling crises and critics?

However, what emerges after some reflection is how trite, how reductive, how absurdly limited, the current criticism of road building or road repairs is.

For the Opposition is focusing on criticising the management of the road works and turning its glaring examples into icons that show the current administration’s inability to get anything right, on time, and within budget.

But that is reductive: it is telling the electorate: this lot is no good; we can do it much better.

Apart from whether this is true or not (and last week this newspaper showed that the Sant administration was worse than Gonzi’s when it came to the paving of Republic Street as against the paving of Merchants Street), the issue facing the electorate once every five years in determining the future of the country does not regard just the names of the people at Castille and in the ministries, but also the policies to be followed. As it is, the country is being offered a choice of people at the top (about which there is much to be said) but hardly any leeway when it comes to which policies will be followed.

Which is precisely where the roads issue should be taken up and discussed rationally, without this obscene concentration on casting criminal aspersions and sowing doubts that anytime there are delays or cost over-runs there must be corruption lurking.

For this government’s biggest failure does not lie in the cost over-runs or in the delays, but in not following a well-thought-out plan on built-up areas and their development, as well as commissioning a radical overhaul of transport policies.

We do not fault the government for at long last tackling a huge programme of road building where people have been living for many, many years with unbuilt roads, despite having paid the road tax, in conditions more reminiscent of Third World countries.

But we do fault this government for not tackling better the viability of the road system in Malta.

Take simple things: the Italian Protocol funds were used to tackle the roads in the north, and they are beautiful roads indeed, but the problem did not lie there: it lies in the south, and in the nodes that the expansion of traffic have created along the one and only highway in Malta – the Regional Road, especially the central part of it.

GRTU, for instance, has justifiably been up in arms over the crossed lines that had Dr Gonzi promising more consultations while someone else had meanwhile ordered the demolition of the old part of the Regional Road bridge.

But that protest is very short-sighted: what is keeping people from venturing to Paceville are not just the queues at the bridge, but the far longer queues from Tal-Qroqq to the Kappara roundabout, which has become one of Malta’s biggest time- and money-wasters.

Equally, on the other side of the Sta Venera tunnels, the queues now extend most times of the day all the way from Sta Venera to the Marsa roundabout and from Sta Lucija to the awful traffic jam next to the cemetery. These are the nodes the government should have tackled. That it did not tackle them and kept postponing them from year to year, from legislature to legislature, is a worse failure than delays on the bridge or cost over-runs when these are justified.