There are flaws in the interview with Bjorn Bonello entitled Surplus parking, higher road capacity, reduction in delays (TMIS 5 June).
Mr Bonello starts off on a constructive note by making reference to “…failed and abused planning and traffic management policies”. But he then goes on to make recommendations which exactly reflect these failed policies that have brought us to where we are today.
Like others, Mr Bonello can only think ‘inside the box’ – the box in this case being a steel cage that runs on four wheels called ‘a car’ – a transport option which, if used excessively, pollutes, takes up space, causes traffic jams, holds up public road transport and is unhealthy.
Mr Bonello’s suggested ‘drastic’ measures also follow the unchanging misguided pattern of past decades – that of thinking mono-modally in terms of facilitating motor car transport and providing yet more parking amenities – to the exclusion of everything else. Everybody knows that this will result in more people opting to use their car and perpetuate the vicious cycle. But the love-affair with the car continues to dominate all our policies.
Mr Bonello tells us “we are fascinated by what happens abroad”. No, we are not. We ignore it. A succession of invited foreign experts have expressed their views and made suggestions which have fallen on deaf ears. To use Mr Bonello’s words, “We often pick and choose what we like…leaving out the parts that are uncomfortable and which make such initiatives uncomfortable and sustainable…” This is absolutely and precisely the point.
Like Transport Malta, Mr Bonello is reluctant to come out of the car comfort zone and face the simple fact that it is time we abandoned the idea that a car is the only means of travelling from A to B. But nobody is willing to give up the comfort zone of the car, even if it takes twice or three-times as long to get to their destination than it did a decade ago. This comfort zone includes, of course, a reluctance on the part of government to lose massive revenues from VAT, the registration and licensing of cars and, especially, the sale of fuel. The health aspect doesn’t matter – it never did. As long as the money rolls in, pollution simply remains an unavoidable fact of life. Never mind the damage to the lungs of growing children, the high prevalence of asthma and lung cancer and increased heart attacks in the not-so-young, to mention only a few of the negative health consequences.
The facts are clear: in virtually every well-off country, Malta included, private cars have outgrown the space in built-up cities and towns. As we are painfully aware, this is particularly the case in Malta. So much of Malta is built-up that we now resemble a metropolis where car transport is becoming impractical. Our density of traffic will soon exceed saturation point, with traffic congestion and pollution that has reached crisis level.
Instead of burying their collective heads in the sand, city and town councils in other countries came to the same conclusion – namely, that they will be better off with fewer cars on the road – and are acting accordingly. The aim is to rebalance the public space and create cities for people with less pollution, less noise and less stress from traffic congestion.
Residential street parking is encouraged to induce people to leave their car at home and switch instead to public transport, shared cars and bicycles. This adaptation to greener, healthier transport is increasingly referred to as “active transport” or “green transport”. It is now an ongoing trend worldwide but Malta remains stuck in a 1950s time-warp.
In Malta we do exactly the opposite of what is recommended by Mr Bonello, who suggests that we “provide a surplus of parking spaces” by creating underground car-parks and remove on-street parking to facilitate vehicle traffic – all this so that more people use their car and add to the congestion and pollution.
Mr Bonello’s tells us: “the ‘strategy’ to discourage people from using private cars and opt for public transport has failed miserably”. Precisely. But, having said that, Mr Bonello ceases to be constructive: “We continue to throw money at public transport without actually solving anything”, he says – when public transport is a pivotal factor in reducing traffic. So much for public transport.
Mr Bonello goes on to say that “the system can only work when a good transport alternative is offered as part of a holistic strategy”. But all Mr Bonello offers us is more of the same as we have had year-on-year without any trace of ‘holism’. The entire tenor of his article is that of making car use more convenient by providing a ‘surplus’ of parking space for cars, so that people might walk even less and not cycle for short trips or use public transport. Amazingly, the word ‘parking’ occurs no fewer than 30 times in his article, whereas ‘public transport’ and ‘walking” barely get a mention. And the dreaded “B” word (bicycle) does not feature at all! Of course, the bicycle is for silly people like the Danes, Dutch, Germans, Swiss, French, Spaniards and Italians. We Maltese are simply too delicate, sophisticated and refined to walk or use a bicycle for short trips – we only travel by car, even if the distance is as short as 500 metres.
As long as our emphasis remains on making the private car as convenient as possible by easing the parking problem and (futile) attempts at easing flow, the problem will not only remain, but become intensified. Awareness that “more roads create more traffic” already existed 80 years ago. But it took decades for politicians and urban planners to realise this. Some cities (such as Copenhagen) took action sooner whereas others (like London) only saw the light much later. In the meantime, we continue to struggle with insane solutions from the 1950s which encourage traffic.
Old solutions for new problems won’t work. We could continue building lucrative multi-storey car parks all over Malta, creating flyovers that only shift traffic jams further along, making pavements narrower to enable roads to accommodate more cars and deterring people from walking or using a bicycle even for short distances. But this will simply make matters worse by encouraging more people to opt for private car transport – and we will be rushing headlong towards gridlock.
Our deeply ingrained car-dependency has destroyed our urban environment; our streets have ceased to be social spaces because they have become traffic spaces and this has depersonalised street life and robbed it of its vibrancy.
This trend must be reversed. Tomorrow matters and it will come.
George Debono