The awful traffic jams over the past few days as schools and tertiary education institutions opened have stressed people out quite heavily, made people and students late for work and for school and generally messed up people’s lives.
Add to that a simple accident in the central part of Malta and the gridlock expands with incredible ripple effects.
And it has not rained so far. Just wait until we get those torrents at 6 or 7am which makes one and all get the car out and take the children to school. This turns our roads into a gridlock and creates a traffic jam on a national scale.
When the bendy buses were taken off the roads by ministerial decree, the persistent optimists saw in it the solution to our problems. The roads were clearer of traffic, these people said, so it must have been the bendy buses that were holding up the traffic.
There is no doubt that the bendy buses were completely inadequate to Malta’s roads. It is not enough for the experts to have declared them safe and for their companies of manufacture to state there’s nothing wrong with them. Boris Johnson added to his popularity by banning them from London’s far wider roads and he got cheap laughs by boasting he had palmed them over to Malta.
But our roads, such as they are, cannot take bendy buses with all the curves and narrows, with all the badly-parked cars, etc.
It might have seemed a good idea at first: the bendy buses take huge quantities of people with just one driver. But the experiment has failed. What that means now for Arriva’s profit and loss, for the validity of the contract, for the government being asked to fork out more money – can all be left in the hands of the authorities to fight over and discuss.
On our part, we can only look on and try to see where it’s all heading. Cars continue to be imported with abandon – both new and second hand ones. The car scrappage system, now that the sum offered has been drastically cut, seems to be attracting very few. Soon, with all the cars on our roads and parked everywhere, we will have to walk on cars to get anywhere. As for driving, that’s a daily nightmare.
Arriva was meant to take up part of the load and to help people leave their cars at home or in the garage. It has not worked. People still use their car with gusto. The roads leading to Valletta and the roads criss-crossing Malta in the central part become part of the gridlock on an almost daily basis.
Things are getting worse and they will inevitably get even worse and worse as long as no long-term policy is devised. The failure of the bendybuses was a failure of perhaps the last pain-free solution. Henceforth, all solutions will be painful and the worse one will be the no solution choice.
In a way, the previous administration had always admitted it was possible for the bendybuses solution to be a failure. It was an attempt that had to be tried but the people proposing it always knew it could boob.
At this point, short of allowing Malta to become ever more gridlocked, the only solution that is being tried is by ironing out the gridlock at the Kappara junction (in some years’ time). As we said at the time, this will definitely not address the real issues. It will only prolong the agony or maybe shift the gridlock a few kilometers this way or that.
Unless we see we all need to change our habits, our innate selfish habits of the past years where we took the car to the shops, and everywhere else and grumbled if we were made to park just a few metres away. It’s now either that the gridlock becomes so bad it forces us to change our habits, or else an enlightened administration makes people forgo their innate selfishness and choose mass transport means.
The bendy buses may have indeed failed, but they were honourable attempts in the right direction. We must now think of alternative strategies that foster quick connections, for the masses rather than for cars with a single person inside.