The stream of cars caught up in a mammoth traffic-jam yesterday week, lashed by rain and poor visibility, heard the sirens coming. ‘At last’, some may have thought, ‘the Task Force promised by the prime minister is coming to shunt private cars aside so that the buses may have priority.’

It was not to be. All it was were two police motorbikes escorting Prince Edward to Valletta among the rain and the traffic jams.

Coming to think of it, seeing police motorbikes on the road, at least when they are not escorting some visiting bigwig, has become rather rare. People with axes to grind have been heard saying that the police motorbikes are the only ones without GPS and that there are cases of police driving their bikes inside a garage and staying there for the rest of their working day. Anyway, an improved motorbike police presence on the road may help matters, and the police are wrong if they think that role has been taken over by the local wardens.

Ever since the announcement of the Task Force, it has been the butt of jokes all over the place but has yet to make its presence known. Traffic has been chaotic and the buses are still running late. The most one saw resembling something new were two forlorn Transport Malta people at the Iklin roundabout and they were not seen doing anything at all.

It could have seemed right, at that crucial meeting when the Prime Minister relieved Austin Gatt from responsibility over the public transport reform, to bring in all possible stakeholders such as the Army and the Police. The police have wrongly been long removed from really being involved in traffic issues ever since the wardens were set up and their return to the scene cannot but be beneficial. But the army?

The entire traffic situation cannot just depend on Arriva finally getting its act together. Only a holistic approach can tackle the Herculean task, which is why the Task Force, for all the snide comments, is the right policy tool. But it cannot end up just following everyone’s favourite hobby horse and doing the things that this or that sector have long been clamouring for without success.

In fact, there is a case to argue that even more players must be brought on to the scene, starting from Transport Malta to Mepa if some kind of order is going to be brought to the chaos on the roads.

Take Attard, as an example. On the morning we are speaking of, Tuesday of last week, the queueing started from just beyond the road to Ta’ Qali. One would have thought the cause of the log-jam were the traffic lights on the junction to San Anton, but when one got there, the traffic was moving smoothly. The real cause of the mayhem lay further upstream, where cars were pouring in from other roads, making the main road log-jammed. Then, as everyone knows, all traffic has to pass through a bottleneck before choosing whether to go to Valletta or to Żebbuġ.

One does not doubt that Transport Malta has all the facts at its fingertips. It probably also has the solutions ready for action. But over the past years, Malta seemed to prefer doing up the roads in the far north of the country rather than tackling and ironing out the problems inside Malta’s agglomeration. In this specific case of Attard, for instance, there has long been felt the need to create a bypass, siphoning traffic away from the town centre. The plans are all there, but the priorities were elsewhere.

One can say much the same thing about the various other problem nodes on the island. Attard is just an example, and maybe there are others which are more apposite, such as Fgura, or the Addolorata Cemetery traffic lights, or San Ġwann or even the Kappara roundabout. The Iklin roundabout is yet another creator of traffic jams, and that’s when it’s not raining.

It is useless to get police breathing down everyone’s neck to free up space for the buses when there is simply no space at all. It is clear and perhaps accepted that priority must be given to buses but what if the buses themselves are late and people have to go to work, take children to school, take other members of the family to their place of work, etc and all the multiple hair-raising tasks each one of us performs each morning.

At long last, we seem to be about to see some action in this direction, but it has been long in coming and maybe there will still be a change of heart between now and execution. The road to the airport is being done up, but the 13 December link to VISET will most probably block Malta’s major arterial road for nearly a year and then not deliver any great improvement to traffic flow.

Plans are almost ready for the Kappara roundabout, and that is surely a priority but the nodes we identified earlier in this leader are still on the ministerial, or TM, back-burner.

That’s what the Task Force must focus on and kick into action.