Car Free Day came and went and nobody noticed anything. We keep ‘celebrating’ the day and year after year it becomes more and more futile and non-sensical.
For the way our traffic is structured, it makes no sense trying to push patronisation of the public bus service instead of the car.
We had our Arriva revolution and while it has its positive aspects, it also has its huge faults and limitations.
Come next Monday, schools reopen after the summer holidays and our roads will once again revert to the clogging traffic jams, every single day. It simply does not make sense to urge people to use public transport for it simply cannot get people to work on time. Nor will it get children to school. Nor to the many after-school activities, such as ballet lessons.
Arriva is very cheap, but that is not everything. People want to get to work, or take their children to school, on time and with the least possible fuss.
We have spent all this time and so much money on reforming public transport and holding car-free days, yet we still see the number of cars on our roads going up. And we still see one-person cars on our roads. So much for car-sharing!
Having considered all this, the country must tackle the other side of the issue. Having failed to persuade people to leave their car at home and use public transport, the country must reform the road network.
This paper has often criticised Transport Malta (and the government) for having the completely wrong priorities where road restructuring is involved.
Over the years, we have seen huge sums being spent on rebuilding roads in remote areas of Malta where people dare venture perhaps once or twice a year.
As for the rest, all the troublesome and difficult nodal points have remained as they have always been. Think of the Msida mess, the Iklin roundabout, the Marsa Cross area, the cemetery traffic lights – and you will be just touching the tip of the iceberg.
Oh, and of course there is the Kappara roundabout, about which so much is being written these days. Some years ago there were traffic lights there, then some bright spark ordered them removed and the roundabout has become one of the main sticky points in the national road system.
Over the past decades, road planners have placed roundabouts where they could not do otherwise. Roundabouts are, of course, better than traffic lights but they are also very inefficient, as one can see at most times of the day as cars queue to go around one. Then comes another, and another. To go, for instance, from Naxxar to St Julian’s, one has to negotiate five roundabouts in quick succession, each with its own queue.
But to go back to Kappara, let us look at the example set for instance by Brussels: Wherever there is a traffic problem, the Belgian traffic planners do not insert a roundabout. Instead, they dip one road and pass it under the road crossing it. It makes for quicker through-traffic all around.
Maybe there are problems in places such as Msida where the road is at sea level and they cannot dig anymore down. But in most cases, a properly-planned underpass will solve huge delays and snarl-ups together with all the road rage they engender.
Maybe too, without going into too much detail regarding the Kappara options, our planners could go for simpler solutions without turning such roundabouts into Malta’s version of spaghetti junction.