Roadworks, traffic chaos and Transport Malta

The last 24 months or so have been fraught for drivers and, indeed, commuters as the programme of road improvements has got fully under way. From north to south and also virtually the whole of Gozo, roadworks have dominated the scene.

In one of the countries with the highest concentrations of car ownership in Europe and with a road network that was mostly designed for the horse and cart rather than the modern age, the effects of so many roads throughout these islands being put out of action at the same time have been dramatic. Travel times to work have lengthened, driver discipline – never very good at the best of times – has worsened and dissatisfaction with Transport Malta and its political boss, Infrastructure, Transport and Communications Minister Austin Gatt, has increased.

The reason given for the traffic chaos has been the need to complete the roadworks within a set period of time if Malta is not to lose the EU funding stream allocated. This may well be true but, if so, the onus on the minister and his agency, Transport Malta, to ensure that the programme of works is well organised and well managed is even greater. On the whole, this has not been the case.

Many major road projects are running behindhand. The capacity of contractors to complete the task on budget and on time has been severely stretched. The cumulative human impact of all these badly managed projects has been significant.

Faced by the influx of heavy additional traffic as a result of the major roadworks along the Mellieħa bypass to Ċirkewwa, a project that is also behind schedule, the mayor of Mellieħa unilaterally decided to protect his residents. He imposed a one-way traffic system preventing vehicles from entering the locality unless these are owned by residents of Mellieħa. Wardens who were stationed near the Seabank Hotel asked motorists for their identity cards before allowing them through, to the understandable fury of Gozitans and non-Mellieħa residents alike.

This led Dr Gatt to tell the Mellieħa mayor, belatedly, that his decision to bar passage through a public road to everyone except local residents was simply “unacceptable”.

However, no sooner had the minister intervened to restore two-way traffic through Mellieħa for all motorists than truck and other heavy vehicle drivers took the law into their own hands and decided to pass through the locality, making traffic congestion even more chaotic.

One is justified to ask where does Transport Malta feature in this saga. Likewise, one cannot but wonder why it has to take the personal intervention of a Cabinet minister to sort out a problem that had rumbled along for some time and over which the transport watchdog has ultimate authority.

Transport Malta has the power “to do all such things as may be necessary for the regulation, management, safety and control of road traffic both at national as well as local level and for this purpose to adopt strategies and standards that are benchmarked at a European level”.

If it had been doing its job properly in the first place there would have been no need for ministerial intervention or, far more importantly, for the inconvenience suffered by thousands of motorists who found their way into Mellieħa barred illegally. The latest flouting of the law by truck drivers, while not directly Transport Malta’s responsibility, calls for its intervention if only to ensure that the “European benchmarking of safety and control of road traffic”, which the regulator is meant to apply, is achieved in practice.