Sweet smell of car-free air

Now that the Balluta car park project has been abandoned, the other end of Sliema is under threat from widening of the Qui-si-Sana road leading to the massive new development on Tigné point. Such widening of a section of a road will serve little purpose beyond bringing added suffocating pollution to the already congested Sliema Front which feeds it.

Altering a road to accommodate more traffic in a densely populated urban area is incomprehensible when one considers that the trend is nowadays towards discouraging urban vehicle traffic. The road revolution started long ago in cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, where many roads were given back to pedestrians and cyclists and measures aimed at discouraging urban motor traffic were introduced. This trend has been in full swing in other European cities. The revolution is now in progress in London and it should serve as an example of what should be happening in Malta.

The plan for London is ambitious. Local high streets will be made pedestrian and bike-friendly, with bike racks and safe cycle lanes so families can walk or cycle to the shops together. Extensive cycle highways stretching from the suburbs right into the centre are being built with the aim of segregating cyclists from traffic in order to encourage greater bicycle use and diminish car use. The bicycle system already in use in cities like Paris and Vienna will soon be in operation in London too, with 6,000 bicycles available to the public for short city trips. This is just a beginning; London is being used as a test-bed for extension of similar bicycle schemes nation-wide.

Attempts at encouraging cycling in Malta have been absent or inept and feeble at best. Because cycling continues to be regarded as a dangerous pursuit, parents are afraid to allow (let alone encourage) children to use a bicycle.

Our new generation is conditioned to being driven around in a car by parents from an early age and rarely comes to experience riding a bicycle. The adolescent "bicycle phase" is skipped and our young generation graduates immediately to driving a car with no road experience whatsoever. This must contribute to the high accident rate among our young drivers, not to mention the frequency of obesity, both in children and adults.

Malta remains perversely stuck in the unhealthy past. The outdated vocabulary of our urban road-planners is limited to "cars", "asphalt", "pavement" (usually narrow), "road hump" and "one way street". The social function of our streets has been so completely ignored over the years that our streets are mostly empty, desolate public spaces which only invite people to drive along them in cars, but not to walk or use a bicycle. Nothing whatsoever is done to encourage healthy walking or low carbon or zero-carbon transport of any kind. "Cycle lanes" are so amateurish and badly designed as to be positively dangerous.

These so-called cycle lanes and "bicycle racks" (in the pretty but useless shape of a bicycle) appeared in the most unlikely places - to justify bogus claims in reports on transport and mobility submitted to the EU that "cycling is being encouraged". Road space continues to be usurped from pedestrians to accommodate cars; urban pavements get narrower so that mothers are often obliged to push prams on the roadway. Our planners are so out of touch with modern approaches to urban road design so that our very roads in themselves encourage obesity.

Let us indulge in wild fantasy: Imagine the entire St Julians and Sliema promenade completely paved or cobbled and given over completely to pedestrians. Cars are permitted, but subject to a 20k/h speed limit.

Motorists have to drive carefully and give priority to pedestrians and cyclists. Buses unload passengers at peripheral termini (equipped with cycle racks) from which passengers may continue their trip into Sliema in an electric bus. Other streets could follow and be progressively re-done so as to discourage car use and invite people to walk more or use a bicycle.

On Sundays only residents' cars are allowed into Sliema, eliminating the miasma of toxic emissions from continuation of the traditional unhealthy Sunday drive through Sliema.

This may sound utopian and far-fetched but it is happening elsewhere. If, by some miracle, it were to come to pass, traffic would be dramatically reduced, the air would smell sweet again in Sliema and the net result would be improved health and well-being through a decrease in pollution and people using their car less with consequent increase in physical activity.

Decades of profiteering by developers and misguided governance have turned Sliema, and much of Malta, into a monstrous, shabby, polluted design fault. To make matters worse, making roads more accessible to traffic always seems to be the key issue, and not health. Our government and councils need to change attitudes and start correcting this mess now.

The report "Towards a low Carbon Society: the National Health, Energy Security and Fossil Fuels", published by The Today Public Policy Institute, can be downloaded from http://www.tppi.org.mt/cms/index.php/reports .