During European Mobility Week the Bicycle Advocacy Group is asking local councils and Transport Malta to make being able to ride a bicycle from one side of their city centre or village core a priority to promote local bicycle commuting trips. By placing an emphasis on cycle routes that are both efficient and safe for people on bicycles, local councils can help to discourage people from using their car for short trips that will significantly help reduce traffic congestion for everybody else.

The group is inviting councils and TM to consider out of the box solutions to the problem of one-way systems that have often facilitated parking on both sides of the street but at the cost of discouraging cycling across city centres and village cores. These solutions can include making residential no entries open to people on bicycles, adding bollards to one-way streets that change residential rat-runs into quiet safe streets again, where people can live without fear of traffic and more formal bicycle contra-flows.

Reducing traffic congestion won’t be easy the group said, but the good news is that people on bicycles are already doing this without costing the state a cent. While this might be a small number, it has a much bigger effect in helping offset car use which is unsustainable. In turn the state and local councils need to address how people on bicycles, cycle across their local village or town? They need to ‘literally walk the talk’ the group said, as most councillors and urban planners do not cycle themselves, they need to walk across towns and cities following the one-way systems to find out how unfriendly such systems are to people on human powered bicycles.