While an underground metro may not be impossible for Malta, the economic case for it has yet to be made, Roads and Transport Minister Austin Gatt has said.

He was speaking to timesofmalta.com after his recent speech about taking "a fresh look" at transport systems in Malta drew an avalanche of comments on timesofmalta.com from readers.

The introduction of a metro was one of the most frequent suggestions.

Dr Gatt said that if Malta's transport problems were to be viewed as being about long traffic jams or unavailability of parking, the county would only be continuing to patch up, when it should really be starting from scratch.

"We have to face up to a few realities first and some of your readers on www.timesofmalta.com were speaking in a way that many of us are ready for this type of thinking," Dr Gatt said.

"There will never be enough parking spaces for everyone, everywhere. Our island has the fifth largest motorisation rate worldwide. Our roads will never be wide enough, not to mention safe enough.

"There must be a shift away from our dependence on cars and towards travelling in groups. This simply has to be the way and I know that the 'cultural' barriers to increase public transport use are really mythological.

"The Park and Ride service from Floriana to Valletta showed that anyone would be happy to use a bus if they are provided with an efficient, reliable, cost-effective service, and in this case it was free!

"But we must also face up to the reality that our existing public transport network is not up to the needs of today and it is not just a matter of changing the buses and getting new ones. The service still won't be sufficient if it sticks to the same old routes with the same old frequencies. People move around and travelling habits changed over the past decades but our transport network has not changed.

"We also do not use all of our transport resources. Taxis, for many reasons, are not for locals. We do not use boats to travel short distances and instead travel longer loops around the harbour complaining of never ending traffic lines.

"Bringing in electric minicabs was a simple transport innovation that has transformed life in Valletta. We need to think more in these terms rather than accepting the dogma that if you must go there the only way to go is driving yourself in your car."

Referring to some of the posted comments, Dr Gatt stressed that it would be a mistake to think that congestion would stop by simply creating more space for cars.

"Our experience of underground car parks and increased access for cars, without any restricted use on the surface, has been to actually persuade more people to use their cars," he said.

"On the other extreme I think an underground metro may not be impossible, but the economic case for it has yet to be made and I stand to be convinced about it.

"What I know is that we cannot wait for this big debate before we start solving problems on the ground.

"The first steps are, quite literally, the small steps. We must prioritise pedestrian and disabled access and increase pedestrianised areas in town centres. The success of the Valletta project should be emulated elsewhere.

"We should extend the mini-cab experiment. We should promote the introduction of lifts and boats connecting in straight lines points that today take longer to travel to and from by roads. We need to give more access to cyclists.

"Then comes the bigger stuff. We need to open the use of taxis to Maltese travellers. We need to change around the bus system to provide people good connections from anywhere to anywhere.

"Having done all that we can think about bigger stuff. Looking at the experience of cities the size of our population around Europe in the last 20 years, a discussion about trams would not be amiss."

When questioned about the road network, Dr Gatt said there was a lot to be done, and that included major administrative decisions.

"There is still a lot of work to be done on the '1' road (from Birżebbuġa to Ċirkewwa). There are entire stretches that are crying out for upgrading especially on the north side of the island such as St Andrew's, Salini and Għadira by ways of example.

"Upgrading those roads will ease congestion but so should our effort to see a shift in transport away from private cars to public transport. Sure not everyone will hop on the buses. But a bus carrying 45 passangers will take seven metres from a road. If those 45 passangers each drove a car we'd be looking at 225 metres of traffic for just the same number of people.

"But I am looking at the whole picture to see how we can refine our priorities. One endemic problem of our set-up is that local councils are responsible for local roads and the government is responsible for arterial roads. There are roads in between those categories that theoretically belong to councils but that are too big for the councils to handle. In jargon they are known as 'link' roads and include for example The Strand in Gżira which is structurally in a mess and politically in limbo on who should fix it."

Dr Gatt said that, while short-term solutions would only solve short term problems, some measures were in the process of being taken.

"In the fairly short term we should be seeing improved road markings and road signs. We should start seeing some better quality road works now that the materials will be tested by an independent laboratory and not by the suppliers of the product themselves.

"On public transport we will soon be working on more local mini-cab services, adequate bus routes to service the airport and the ADT will be working with MMA to improve the water connections in our harbour.

"The board I set up to oversee the Roads Department addresses one of the obvious weaknesses we had at the organisational level.

There is no doubt of the advantage that public and private transport are planned for by one authority. But roads need focus and resources and clearly this area was weak at the top. There are plenty more changes to make in our structural set-up but this is where we started from," he said.