Editorial

There are enough absurd deaths without adding preventable ones to the total. We, the possible victims of death on the road, and legislators responsible to make our surroundings safer, can prevent many of them. So the news that rear seat-belts are to be made compulsory will be greeted with a few rounds of applause.

It is strange that this measure has taken so long to find its way into our statute books; stranger still that the European Commission failed to spot this one earlier.

There are more deaths on the road every day in Europe than American soldiers are killed in wars. Numbers alone justify any directive from the Commission to make car travel safer.

If passengers in the front seats, driver included, are required to wear these belts to prevent them going through the windscreen or impaling themselves on the steering wheel, those in the back, it naturally follows, suffer similar risks. One such is that as the doomed car slams to a sudden halt, their bodies are bound to hurtle forward and come up against either the bodies of the passengers in front, who already have trouble enough of their own, or other even harder objects.

Safety on the road in Malta, or an absence of it, is due to a number of factors. We see for ourselves, daily, the risks taken by young drivers when they find themselves behind the wheel. We have come across arrogant pedestrians who decide it is not only the pavement that belongs to them but the road as well - and at a time of their own choosing. We witness just as often the lack of courtesy that has become the hallmark of the educated and the uneducated. Road rage is never far behind and a proportion of owners of cars that do not have an airconditioner are swiftly at the end of their tether.

Other elements creep into the very fail-unsafe system: the state of some of our roads; the obstructions created by construction sites; the slowness of drivers as well as their Formula 1 counterparts; the refusal of some drivers to obey traffic signs on the roads never mind traffic lights; the incompetence with which diversions from a route are dealt, not to mention the placing of diversionary signs after the diversion has begun; the evident inertia by police officers, particularly members of the mobile squad, to nick road cowboys and the apparent inability/unwilligness of local wardens in promoting road safety education.

Yet, it is not all a tale of woe. Traffic signs, for the most part, and directions signs in particular, have improved enormously. Bus stops, some at least, allow a bus to edge in so that traffic is not obstructed - but just as often bus drivers do not give a damn. The sight of two bus drivers stopping in the middle of the road and exchanging whatever it is that bus drivers exchange while plying their routes has not been banished. Truth is there is not enough police surveillance and many drivers get away with murder, metaphorically.

So, to the three cheers we send up for the introduction of another safety measure - seat-belts for passengers in the back - we add a plea for greater self-discipline on the roads and where this is not evident, greater discipline enforced by the traffic police.

The Malta Transport Authority should live up to its name and exercise its authority fairly but surely.