There is more to reflect upon from the New Year’s Eve fiasco at Valletta and Floriana, other than decry the two local councils which went head to head in organising competing attractions at the same time and thus impeded each other. Or other than decry the couldn’t care less attitude of the bus drivers who failed to turn up or whoever organised the evening for not foreseeing that thousands would want to go home immediately after the event.

The same thing happened when Malta joined the EU in May 2004. We have learned nothing in the meantime.

But apart from such knee-jerk reactions which have had their fill in news blogs, comment pages and the like, there are more reflections to be made.

The first is really simple: Valletta, our capital city, is a peninsula. Hence those who want to go there have one direction to take and one to come back. It is not at a crossroads, its only access is from the landside (at least until the Barrakka Lift is up and running and if and only if the promised sea connections with the two sides {the Grand Harbour and Marsamxett} are in place and running and hopefully taking a share of the traffic.)

More. Come March, when Pope Pius V Road is demolished along with City Gate, access to Valletta will be further restrained to St Paul Street from the Castille access and to the rather small streets both on the Marsamxett side and on the Memorial Bell side.

In short, Valletta is suffering from very severe access problems – and these are due to become worse in the short-term. This is being reflected in the sales (or lack of) in the Valletta shops whose only source of customers seems to be those using the public bus service.

But Valletta suffers not just from access problems leading TO it, but also from access problems INSIDE IT. The liberalisation of electric transport as from 1 January may be too early to assess its impact, but nothing seems to have changed as from 31 December 2010. We have been promised two buses plying continually the streets of Valletta as part of the public bus reform, so we will have to wait till 3 July to see this happen.

For the revitalisation of Valletta to happen, as we all desire, it is imperative for people to be able to move right into the city and also to move out to the buses or parked cars. It is now clear to all that the CVA reform has not made much of an improvement for Valletta’s streets are still clogged by parked cars and parking is impossible to find at most hours.

So unless one has a fairy godmother who somehow finds a parking slot handy, one must either use the park-and-ride facility, which is OK for people who intend to spend some time in the city, or else park at any of the private parking facilities outside Valletta and walk in. Or else use the public transport system, which again stops at City Gate. Or else forget about going to Valletta, as more and more people seem to be doing.

The experience of other countries would seem to suggest a raft of proposals which would reduce the clogging by cars and facilitate access. We will not be reinventing the wheel. Other countries acted by mixing a taste of the stick and a taste of the carrot – high access charges (not the very low CVA charges), bus lanes all the way through, mass transport systems (let’s see the impact of Arriva’s bendy-buses next NYE), cross-harbour transport systems, and, most importantly, inner city transport (possibly electrical, hence non-polluting).

Most of these are in the works and we all look forward to seeing them being implemented.

But above all, we need one very important ingredient – common sense by our politicians and our authorities. For just as it made no sense to have two competing attractions tripping each other up, it likewise made no sense to hold a NYE event in a square that can take, let’s say, 8,000 people and then 30,000 turn up. Just as it made no sense to have the Christmas lighting in Valletta switched off at 10.30pm on NYE and leave the crowds in darkness. Many accidents could have happened with all those people with prams and children. And there could have been better distribution of the over-extended police force on such a night. And of traffic wardens. And perhaps other alternate routes could have been used – some people have said they exited quickly enough through the Sa Maison hill. But again, this shows that it’s still not true that ‘b’tal-linja jaqbillek’ as it still transpires that having a car is the best thing to have.