Once more we find ourselves writing an editorial about poor road planning.

In recent years we have seen controversy over the widening of Tal-Balal, the Central Link project and countless other projects where their planning and sustainability has been put into question – but today’s subject is probably the most flagrant of all when it comes to how necessary it even is in the first place.

We are referring to a proposal to widen the road between Victoria and Marsalforn in Gozo from a two-lane road (one each direction) to a four-lane road. 

We have seen road widening – such as in the case of Central Link – where the project could be justified because there is a frequent build-up in traffic in the areas in question.  Fair enough, even if the fact remains that road widening is a stop-gap solution which does not address the main problem Malta has, which is too much car-reliance.

In this case however, there is no such traffic build-up on this road – save for Gozo’s busiest weekends, such as the Santa Marija weekend – which coincidentally was the weekend which was chosen for a traffic analysis of the road to be taken.

To put you in the picture: 10,693sq m of agricultural land are to be taken up for this project, destroying 300 trees and shrubs, of which 44 are protected species. The project will impact a waterway, dikes, water reservoirs and cultural landscape – all just to widen what is essentially a village road which sees a certain (but generally still manageable) volume of traffic for three months in a year.

Of course, no Environmental Impact Assessment was carried out, and the traffic figures presented at the hearing for the proposal were skewed to make it seem like this project was necessary.

Another excuse is that the project is part of the European Ten-T network which is why it had received funds from the EU to carry out.  The Ten-T policy is “to close gaps, remove bottlenecks and technical barriers, as well as to strengthen social, economic and territorial cohesion in the EU.” Who knew that the stretch of road between Victoria and Marsalform was an EU bottleneck?

The coup-de-grace is that, in typical fashion, by the time the project came to face the Planning Authority board on Thursday, the €9 million tender for its construction had already been awarded to a consortium of Gozitan businessmen.

Little surprise then that the Planning Authority essentially ignored any concerns and approved the project last week.

Some may think that there is no reason behind such a project, but one finds a reason in everything.  Whether this is the latest episode of misguided infrastructural planning, or whether this is simply an excuse to use up EU funds which would otherwise go to waste, or whether this is some form of pre-election gambit in order to keep big businesses close and the economic wheel turning – we doubt we’ll ever never know for certain.

What we do know for certain however is that as long as utterly needless projects like this which have no problem in continuing to decimate agricultural land continue to be allowed to take place in Gozo, any politician or government who claims to have Gozo and its “sustainable development” (the latest buzz-phrase) at heart deserves nothing more than to be laughed out of the room.