Transport and Infrastructure Minister Aaron Farrugia is not happy with the results of the much-flaunted measure introduced by the government last year – free public transport.
In a long interview he gave to The Malta Independent on Sunday last week, he made it clear that in October, a year after the introduction of the scheme, the government will take stock of the situation and then decide on the way forward.
He said he will be making a presentation to the Cabinet on how the free public transport idea is (not) working and “then we will decide”.
Does this mean that the government is planning to withdraw the free public transport concept? We doubt it, as this would mean that the government would be admitting to a total failure, and it would not look good from a political angle.
But from the minister’s words it is evident that the government expected much better results.
Malta is spending €6 million a month to sustain the measure, but the minister has questioned its value for money. “Did we see the shift we wanted in the country with free public transport? How many Maltese youths, adults, workers truly left their cars and, maybe twice or three times a week started using public transport?”
He then answered his own question. “I don’t think this happened.” And he’s right.
Aside from considering the removal of the free public transport concept, there are other ways the government could choose to try to mitigate the traffic problem, or at least (hope to) encourage more people to leave their personal vehicles at home and use buses. Having on-street parking meters is one of them. Increasing the road certification tax is another. Yet, even here, the minister knows that most people would just absorb the extra costs and continue to use their personal cars, so there will not be any gains via what would be unpopular moves.
As long as people continue to predominantly make use of their own personal cars, buses will continue to get stuck in traffic, which means that they will arrive late. It’s the chicken-and-egg situation – people do not use buses because many believe that the system is unreliable, but public transport is late mostly because many continue to use their private transport.
Let’s give a few numbers: there are 1,500 vehicles for every 1,000 licensed drivers; every household has an average of 1.5 passenger cars, the total number of cars on the road has increased by an average of 29 per day, according to the latest figures published by the National Statistics Office.
More importantly, the overall number of vehicles on the road has increased by almost one-fifth since the beginning of 2016. That has not surprisingly coincided with the steady rise in the population of Malta, which has roughly gone up by 100,000 in the last decade to surpass the half million mark. In other words, the increase in the number of cars on the road has been proportionate to the jump in population.
This is why, then, it is so worrying to hear the Finance Minister say that Malta’s population will have to balloon to 800,000 by 2040 if the country is to keep its economy growing at the current rate, unless a new economic model is devised.
Imagine that – with the present resident population of 520,000 – and this excludes the presence of the 200,000 tourists who are in Malta, on average, every month – we already feel oppressed and suffocated. We already spend hours in traffic. The peak hours now extend beyond the morning rush to work/school and the early evening’s rush back home – there are traffic issues in our main thoroughfares almost at every hour of every day between 6am and midnight. These are made even worse when there is a serious traffic accident on one of the main carriageways, as happened last Tuesday on the Regional Road tunnels in St Julian’s.
Now just try to think of the impact of having a 55% jump in that, and the correspondent rise in the number of cars. In simple terms, for every two cars there are today there will be three, with the result that the chaos we have today will become worse. Even if we had to double the flyovers and widen most thoroughfares, this would not be of respite.
What we’re saying is that, on the one hand, the government should listen to what its Finance Minister is saying, and work steadily to change the economic model which, at present, is largely based on population increase. On the other hand, we will wait for October to see what the government will decide on ways to tackle the traffic problem, public transport included.
public transport included.