At this time of the year, something happens which has always struck me as beautifully symbolic. Just as the Sun, that universal symbol of Enlightenment, Reason, and Goodness and, once, even seen as God - just as the sun reaches its lowest point in the sky, Chaos, the sun's nemesis, reigns supreme over Malta. And chaos rules precisely through those soulless machines that we all drive.
Christmas traffic is notorious in Malta, second only to that which starts with the scholastic year, in October. This is a problem we have known about for decades and has become something we have come to expect.
The chaos to which I referred is not just the obvious external confusion of traffic jams, accidents and missed appointments, drink-driving, injuries and deaths. It is also an inner chaos in our thinking, which leads to all this being exacerbated. Most of us seem to think that cars can go on increasing exponentially on this limited land mass, ad infinitum. We are putting more than 40 new cars on the road every day. I'm rubbish at maths, but it doesn't take a genius to see that, at this rate, it won't be long before we reach complete gridlock. Then what will we all do?
The authorities' way of solving this problem is to build more roads, such as the one proposed in Attard. If we build more roads, there will be more space to move, or so the thinking goes.
Unfortunately, the facts have definitively proved, once and for all, that this hypothesis is false. If we build more roads, all that happens is that more cars are added, until those new roads are jammed too. In 1962, Anthony Downs described this as "the fundamental law of congestion".
This phenomenon, also known as 'induced traffic', conforms to the usual economic laws of supply and demand and is exacerbated by our psychological drives. A 2009 study that compared road increases in various US cities to the distances driven in those cities, found a one-to-one correspondence over 20 years, confirming the law of congestion.
In other words, cars increase in number to fill the space available for them. Roads have been compared to water pipes that not only cannot cope with the current flow, but seem to suck in even more water, quickly reaching full capacity every time they are widened.
In short, it is a proven fact that there can never be enough space for all the cars we want and yet our thirst for driving seems to be unquenchable. Are we to accept that we are stuck in traffic for the rest of our lives?
Who knows, perhaps with the birth of Baby Jesus this year, more people will see the light and, rather than blaming buses, learner drivers and the usual underdogs, will understand that they themselves are the main contributors to traffic. Perhaps they might even resolve to drive less, come the New Year.
Meanwhile, those sun-worshippers and followers of Apollo, as Nietzsche would have portrayed them, plan to completely devastate a huge stretch of naturally irrigated farmland in order to build a by-pass in Attard. Not only will we lose around 25,000 square meters of precious agricultural land that does not need (further?) boreholes or desalinisation plants to operate, we will also lose - if the road is built - all the water this land collects when it rains, which will be lost to the sea as runoff.
Water, as every resident of Malta should know by now, is one of our biggest problems.
Is this project reasonable? The only way it could be construed as such is if we were to ignore our long-term benefit, such as actually reducing travelling times and conserving water, and if our aim were merely to increase GDP and to be seen as having tried to do something about traffic.
They are building a massive road, knowing that this will not solve the problem of traffic, and knowing that it will add to our water problems. They do this for political power and economic benefit. In some narratives, they might be seen as evil incarnate. It is certainly not intelligible in the light of reason and our long-term good.
As the year closes, it might do to think about which side we are on, that of the light or that of chaos.