ADT ignored 70,000 emissions reports since beginning of last year

The Malta Transport Authority has ignored more than 70,500 SMSs since the beginning of 2008, from people with enough civic sense to report polluting cars.

Figures seen by The Times show that nearly 207,000 SMSs were received since the Emissions Alert service was launched by the ADT in 2005.

Ironically, the number of messages peaked right when the authority decided to suspend testing the reported cars to update the system it used to filter the SMSs.

The authority last week admitted it had not tested any cars reported by SMS in 2008 and 2009, saying it was working on a new automated system to filter the information because the manual method they had employed before that was too time consuming.

The transport watchdog was reacting to a damning report, tabled in Parliament by the Auditor General, which revealed that the ADT had ignored text messages sent in by citizens reporting vehicles belching excessive amounts of exhaust.

Vehicle emissions are a major source of air pollution, which impacts negatively on public health and the environment. Their effects are further aggravated by Malta's high vehicle density and the fact that the average age of cars is much higher than the EU's.

According to the Auditor General's report, the public reported a whopping 30 per cent of the public transport vehicles, 10 per cent of commercial vehicles and four per cent of private vehicles.

Curiously, when asked for this breakdown, the ADT said it did not have a breakdown of how many of the SMSs received involved buses, how many involved trucks and how many were about private vehicles.

In just five months in 2005 (the campaign was launched in August), the authority received 44,058 reports.

In 2006 and 2007, it received 51,067 and 41,198 respectively. That went up to a record of 53,970 in 2008.

In the first six months this year, it received 16,603 reports from people who did not know that the cars they were reporting were not being summoned for testing. But the figures suggest the messaging was already on the wane.

While apologising for temporarily suspending tests on reported vehicles, the ADT has said that emissions tests were still carried out by VRT stations, by road-side inspections and by random checks on private passenger-carrying and goods-carrying vehicles, including public transport buses, coaches, trucks and other heavy vehicles.

The ADT said that once the new system was in place, it would call up for emission testing those vehicles reported by three or more SMS messages over the past months.

mxuereb@timesofmalta.com