Over the past weeks, the government tried to get back some of its badly failing sheen through some road works that were concluded.

The road leading from Marsa to the airport has been reopened, much to the approval of car drivers who use those roads. So too has the small road from the VISET car terminal to Marsa (where the works on the much more difficult underpass that will block 13 December Road are just beginning).

There are, of course, all those road works in the North – the Mellieha bypass, the road from Mellieħa Bay to Ċirkewwa, and the roadworks in Gozo.

Even so, however, these multiple roadworks leave many unfazed.

It is clear, for starters, that somehow most of the works that have been done or are being done have all tended to concentrate on the relatively uninhabited north and in the countryside.

But the country’s main road problems lie in the badly congested South, where bad planning has forced all traffic to pass through the Addolorata traffic lights junction.

There are other sticky points in the traffic network: what about, for instance, the Iklin roundabout, and the various Qormi roundabouts, that at Tal-Balal, and the road at Burmarrad that becomes clogged with traffic every weekend?

Each of these points are very difficult to solve, but nothing gets done about them, while we spend our money on roads in the countryside where very few people ordinarily go (except, of course, those coming or going to Gozo).

And what about the permanent traffic jam at the Ta’ Xbiex end of Gżira (near the petrol station and the kiosk) where the government had committed itself to widening the road – and creating a link to the Kappara roundabout in as early as the 1990s and nothing has been done so far, even though the Tigne peninsula has meanwhile become over-filled with apartments and shops?

Then there is Msida with its equally badly planned traffic light system and waste of time – let alone the bad flood management system that has contented itself with half measures for as long as one can remember.

So that’s one thing to be made extra clear: for all the boasting that is done, much, much more still needs to be done. And it’s about time that we start tackling the real problems that cause delays, anger and frustration on a daily basis – not on the family’s annual jaunt to Gozo. It is useless, and worse, to have good roads only for the system to get bogged down when it gets to the old inhabited areas.

Then there is the curious situation at Victoria, Gozo. Here, as we referred to last week, it was the main street of the second island’s capital that got pulled up. The works, so far as one can see, have stopped at the upper reaches of the main road. One assumes that part will have to be done later, thus repeating, and perhaps magnifying, the inconvenience of the past months.

But one still has to ask: Why was this work undertaken instead of ensuring that Victoria gets a real bypass surrounding it, helping traffic avoid the town centre? Logically, it was the bypass that should have come first and only then, when traffic could be re-routed through the bypass, should roadworks in the centre of the town have been undertaken.

Once again, hoping against hope, we urge what we have been saying for the past months: It surely does not require any rocket science to ensure that road markings do not fade away and that roadworks are coordinated before any extensive road rebuilding is undertaken.

They call it common sense, but it seems notorious by its absence.