Our Transport Minister has promised to publish the initial recommendations of the Road Safety Bureau. Possibly, in the meantime after this article was being penned, he announced them. All these reports, ideas, promises and now even bureaux, make me laugh, puke and cry.
They reinforce the feeling that we are led by fools. We, of course, are bigger fools because we let them lead us a merry, or rather tragic, dance.
Sadly, whatever plans, whatever hare-brained ideas, the authorities come up with, it will never be enough, because what should happen, what should be the national consensus if we had a conscience, will not even be contemplated.
No minister, premier, or bureau chief will ever think of doing what is now glaringly needed. We need to, as a country, ditch the cult of the car. We are slaves of cars; cars, in our life, come first and above all. Before something is done to stop this adulation of the car, nothing is going to make our streets safer, our roads people-friendly and our air more breathable.
Look at it another way. Think scooters; or rather the rental e-scooter saga before they were totally banned. There's no doubt these e-scooters were horrors and true menaces. They were everywhere. They scared the living daylights out of everyone, zooming out from nowhere on pavements supposedly reserved for pedestrians. They were left strewn anywhere and everywhere when the renters had done with them.
But did they kill anyone? In the worst scenarios - and this was horrific - they maimed one or two people. But no one was killed, slowly or instantly, as cars and other vehicles have been doing since they came along.
Yet the minister, whoever he was at the time, decided that the only way out of the rental e-scooter mania was to get them off the road. A ban of all rental e-scooters. No use discussing; they were a nuisance, so get them out of the sight of every man and woman in Malta.
Now take this comparison further. Think how many times we have heard of horrendous accidents on our roads caused by vehicles. I won't quote figures because if we turn it into a numbers game it all becomes monstrous. Because we - the ones who have had people close to us killed or maimed on our roads - must never be turned into a statistical detail.
The dead, and the ones bearing the brunt of the accidents, must never be seen as an appendix to be discussed in a vacuum. Because, when bureau chiefs and people in authority speak in this way, they think that, as long as accidents decrease when compared to preceding years, they are doing a good job.
But statistical analysis is a cold-blooded way of looking at the menace on our roads.
Something serious, something totally revolutionary, needs to be done. No amount of tinkering of our rules, of increases in maximum jail sentences, of adding more stringent tests for drivers, of better policing, will change the way of our roads.
Better driving, better enforcement, will help but hardly make a difference. The problem is that we constantly keep adding vehicles; we keep building wider, straighter roads, making drivers feel they can speed away in their super-potent cars.
The way forward is to realise we have given too much space, and power, to the car. The king - and queen - of the road is the car.
The poor pedestrian is a second-class citizen who always has to find ways to avoid traffic, congestion, noise.
It is impossible - even if wonderful - to do away with cars completely. But we can start by curbing car use. We need to make them less attractive, highly taxed, and impossible to drive at high speeds, especially in populous areas. Otherwise, the car will remain the most important piece of machinery in the island.
We need to find alternative means of travel. Better public transport, better parking areas outside towns and villages, and more connectivity from parking areas to the centres.
We need to give more space and possibility - without fear of getting maimed or worse - to walking, cycling, jogging, and anything which makes us healthier, saner, ultimately happier.
No short-term solution or a quick fix to this situation where cars are supreme can ever be found. Those quick fixes only serve ministers or bureau chiefs to gain brownie points on social media.
Until we handle this problem properly, until we change our attitude and finally give all humans precedence on the roads, and drivers of cars less of a lethal instrument, life on the Maltese streets will remain a menace.
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