Lord Strickland is said to have once defined us as “Maltese gemgem”. We moan about everything under the sun, including the sun itself. At the same time, we rarely take a look inwards to see whether we are also at fault.
We moan about the traffic gridlock but then some of the same moaners are the first to buy large second-hands cars from abroad such as four wheelers or flashy saloon cars with fancy brand names.
It may be that all this is a psychological side-effect of living on a small island, where we tend to think larger than our size should permit. These cumbersome showy cars have been discarded abroad but are legally allowed to be imported in our small country to aggravate our already dire traffic situation and dismal environmental problems.
I am under the strong impression that statistics show that the importation of second-hand cars has far oustripped that of new cars.
The same applies to heavy duty vehicles, such as trucks, Hymacs and bowsers we see every day cluttering our narrow roads. Some years ago, I saw a documentary on an English TV station on how these written-off vehicles end up in Malta. The documentary by Roger Cook concluded that Malta had become their dumping site – an alarming conclusion!
There are more than enough reasons why Prof. Manfred Boltze, the German traffic expert recently in Malta, is correct in his assertion that infrastructural solutions are not enough to solve our traffic problems.
Any such solution needs to be supported by administrative and legal tools, among which, and one of the foremost, should be the use of fiscal measures to control the importation of used vehicles.