Every six months or so as we live in the arid desert conditions around Salini, where the daily dust clouds sandblast, not only the side of the car, but the plastic lamp covers of the family BMW Mini.

We venture off to the local garage and purchase and use ‘T Cut’ scratch remover in liberal quantities. This cleans the sandblasted effect off plastic covers and then to finish the job we use Brasso over the course of a week (once a day) to polish the plastic so that it looks almost as good as new.

This has been regularly done for the past four years. This little preamble is meant to be of use to the many owners who are suffering from the same sandblasting effect and like us have absolutely no intention of spending hundreds of euros necessary to purchase new plastic lamp covers.

The Coast Road widening process goes on at great pace, dust clouds envelop things from time to time, diggers and crushers do a fine job, and of course we still argue that the advent of sea water in that stretch from Kennedy grove to the traffic lights should keep the gang of happy workers more than content for months on end.

A sudden thought – are some of the gangs of workers those that were until May doing something of great use on the salt pans?

This month the great motoring adventure took us from St Paul’s Bay via arterial roads as far as Rabat. We then ventured along the Rabat/Siggiewi road continuing more than happily along well-surfaced link roads beyond Qrendi and Mqabba and then via other well-surfaced roads as far as Marsaxlokk. We looked at the shortest road that links Marsaxlokk with Birżebbuġa, and decided against using it so veered off to the outskirts of Żejtun onto Birżebbuġa.

The road home led us up the nicely surfaced road towards Żabbar. In fact we hacked off to the left before getting to the end of this bypass, avoiding Hompesch Arch. This shortcut was taken to get down to Żejtun in short order, as we knew that much money had been spent on resurfacing the road.

... are some of the gangs of workers those that were until May doing something of great use on the salt pans?

From Żejtun back to St Paul’s Bay on nicely surfaced arterial roads was a total doodle and so we happily proved that with a bit of research great swathes of our island home can now be covered without so much as denting a rim, let alone getting a puncture – providing no risks at all are taken when approaching any one of hundreds of man-hole covers.

One finds a genuine gripe when thinking about or talking about the enormous waste of money that could be far better spent if the manager of the traffic management section would study modern European road signs and carriageway markings.

Instead of placing as many large signs as possible, there should be a total rethink and place smaller signs only where actually required. Sensible road markings should be painted with continuous centre lines only where required and not to punish thousands of motorists stuck behind either very slow moving trucks, agricultural vehicles or inexperienced motorists either plodding along with an instructor or managing on their own after passing our not too exacting driving test.

How many motorists actually realise it is an offence to drive so slowly that great streams of traffic are allowed to build up.

If Transport Malta painted appropriate broken lines it would be the second vehicle in line causing the tailback. As it is, it is obligatory for any vehicle holding back a stream of traffic to pull over whenever possible so that the following mass can overtake and proceed at a normal speed. Not 35kph on an arterial road unless that is the maximum allowed.

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