It is truly amazing how a simple matter for which a solution is normally found without any fuss as a matter of routine can become so absurdly complicated and politicised in Malta (Overpass No Safety Solution For The Mrieħel Bypass, January 12). We are talking here of a little stretch of road, about one mile long, where two young pedestrians recently lost their lives while crossing.

It does not need much sense of decency to recognise that loss of life on the road should be taken seriously. Yet there was strong government opposition in Parliament to any concession to pedestrian safety. On this occasion the empty self-serving rhetoric and misinformed arguments against doing anything to make crossing this road safer for pedestrians, because it might delay motorists’ onward progress by a few seconds, were nothing short of obscene.

Possibly the most insensitive and irrelevant comment of all in the context of the death of two young pedestrians were the pious platitudes of one MP who drew attention to “the bigger picture” where the government “had at heart the lives of all citizens”, “invested a great deal in health through educational programmes” (what connection this has to violent death on the road is anybody’s guess), that “drivers now had better facilities in arterial roads” and so on.

However, it was Minister Austin Gatt who outdid everybody with a sweeping comment that it is “an internationally-accepted norm” that “four-lane roads” should “not be interrupted by junctions and traffic lights”. Even if this wild generalisation were correct, it is all the more ludicrous because the Mrieħel bypass is a mere one-mile section of road with a roundabout junction at one end and a traffic light junction at the other end. Not only this; there is also a money-spinning speed camera which forces cars to slow down for about half the length of the bypass. It is the height of absurdity to talk about such a tiny bit of road on a crowded small island as though it were a motorway stretching through open countryside for a long distance measured in hundreds of miles.

The nebulous argument that a zebra crossing or pelican lights “did not make sense because traffic moving at 80 kph would not be calmed within a short distance” (whatever that means) is meaningless.

On such a short bit of road, reduction of speed from 80 kph to, say, 60 kph would only add just 25 seconds to transit time. In the absence of pedestrian crossings, these 25 seconds could mean the difference between life and death of a pedestrian.

In any case, anybody who has lived abroad will have seen many instances on major roads where sequential traffic lights at intersections are cunningly synchronised in such a way that motorists have a green light all the way if they keep to the designated speed limit. It should not be beyond the ingenuity of one of our traffic experts to work out how a traffic light-controlled pedestrian crossing (or even two of them) is synchronised with the lights at the Attard end so that drivers who stop at a red light on the pedestrian crossing will be assured of clear onward passage across a green light further along at the other end, provided they proceed within the designated speed limit. This would be a simple, inexpensive and fair solution which does not interfere with traffic flow, and will save lives. In this way the needs of all are covered – and this is how it should be.

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