Curtail car use in village cores

Congratulations to Lija council for trying to look after the environmental interests of its residents by installing so many effective sleeping policemen.

This is the least they can do to try and control dangerous driving through narrow village centre streets, as we are suffering in central Attard. Why should the village core streets of places like Attard and Lija be used by non-residents as a thoroughfare, causing local environmental degradation and increased risk to life and limb?

It needs to be better appreciated (not least by the Malta Transport Authority) that the car is an increasingly serious threat to the environmental quality of Maltese towns and villages, and that take-up of public transport will not increase as long as use of the private car is not curtailed.

Those who observe traffic management arrangements when visiting developed countries would be acquainted with how private cars are being increasingly kept out of village and town centres, with parking on the streets usually allowed only for residents. In places like central London, residents have to pay an annual fee to be allowed to park their car in their street.

The parking situation in places like Sliema is becoming unsustainable, rendering it a place to avoid (rather than be attracted to) if possible. Only drastic solutions will work, like no more free parking (or no parking at all) on the streets for non-residents.

But of course, an adequate number of car parks (in spite of Sliema residents' apparent perennial opposition to car parks) would be necessary.

We have an increasingly similar situation in tiny central Attard, formerly a quiet village, and now getting noisier and busier with restaurants, band clubs trying to convert themselves into discos, and cars using central Attard to get somewhere else. Why shouldn't traffic in places like Attard and Lija be managed similarly to that at Mdina?

Difficult problems need difficult decisions for drastic solutions. Brussels is not going to solve these urban environmental and pollution problems for us. It is we who have to lift ourselves from banana republic to developed country status. The buck rests with the Malta Transport Authority and with our politicians.

Is it too much to hope for some action (in the foreseeable future, of course, unlike the Opera House rebuilding programme)?