The Bicycling Advocacy Group (BAG) touts itself as an advocacy group for Maltese commuting (as opposed to leisure, presumably) cyclists. Its Facebook page enjoys the membership of over a thousand people. Quite how many of these actually commute-cycle is another matter, but never mind.
The other day, BAG suggested that government might wish to introduce contraflow cycling lanes as a step towards bicycle-friendly roads. These would encourage people to cycle to work, which in turn would ease traffic congestion.
The other thing that we’re told would ease traffic congestion is an efficient system of public transport. Very soon, taxpayers will be paying Autobuses de Leon somewhere in the region of €30 million a year towards that end.
Now I rather like bicycles and cycling. I even have an ancient Motobécane with drop handlebars which I take out for a spin every now and again, usually when long-discarded beliefs in the immortality of the soul come back to haunt me. Either way, cycling’s fun and anything that might be done to facilitate it is fine by me.
Nor do I have an issue with public transport. At one time I used to rather enjoy the odd bus ride to and from Valletta. That was before Austin Gatt and Manwel Delia unleashed their combined genius onto the problem and transformed what used to be a 15-minute journey into an elaborate manoeuvre that often left me stranded outside the airport with no luggage to declare.
Still, and just as with cycling, I would welcome anything that might be done to facilitate public transport. Where I part company with the cycle and bus brigade is their claim that cycling and taking the bus are reasonable alternatives to driving. They aren’t, nor will they ever be.
The thing with cars is, they’re so darned convenient. There do exist some rare situations in which cycles or buses win on that count. I know this because I spent four years as a student in a university town. It would have been mad of me to run a car in those circumstances. My bicycle was more than enough in town, and buses and trains saw to the rest.
It is, however, shortsighted to think of Maltese people as living the student lifestyle and of Malta as some kind of extended university town. The convenience of going wherever you like at any time of day or night, and cocooned in your own comfort pod at that, is unbeatable. Traffic or no traffic.
That, and the fact that a good chunk of what we do is premised on car use. The average person drives their children to school on their way to work, picks up a few groceries at a convenience shop on the way back home, stops at an ATM, and so on. The way roadside ‘showrooms’ (actually shops, in most cases) have mushroomed all over the place provides a big clue to understanding all of this.
My maxim for the new year, and certainly not one to take literally,is to make love,not war, on cars
Malta is an autopia, in other words. To harp on about alternative means of transport is to produce more lateral thinking than we can comfortably consume, even if buses may well provide the surest route to reading all of Edward de Bono’s 60-odd books.
As for the rest of us, we would do well to embrace the autopia, so to say. For starters, we might consider looking into the unresolved regions of our relations to cars and their corollaries.
J.G. Ballard was one of few writers I know of who didn’t malign the car as the natural enemy of functional towns and cities. Rather, he brought two things to the equation. First, the notion that cars and driving were easily on a par with walking as markers of individual freedom. Second, that the relation was not without its aesthetic side.
His ideas took a strange twist in Crash, a 1973 novel about fetishists who got their kicks from being involved in planned car crashes. The novel was later made into an explicit film by David Cronenberg. Lest readers come to funny conclusions, I saw the film at a cinema in Malta that sold popcorn and wasn’t located in a seedy building on St John Street.
The idea isn’t exactly edifying and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it. In any case, neither Ballard nor Cronenberg were pornographers. Their drift was rather to explore the darker regions of contemporary autopias.
That comes rather close to local popular notions of cars as ‘sodod fuq erba roti’ (beds on four wheels) as well as to the tired jokes involving car bonnets, glove boxes, and gear levers.
It’s just one side of our amorous relations to cars, the same side that makes us say things like ‘traqqadha barra’ (literally, to make her sleep outside), of a car without a garage. The point is that we love our cars in ways that my feelings for my Motobécane could never hope to match.
The maddening bit is that this popular sentiment is rarely picked up by governments and public planners. Their relations with cars are positively fraught at every turn and produce horrors like car-free days and bollard forests.
The refusal of the public mind to embrace cars and driving as aesthetic creatures in their own right has serious consequences. Take roads, which are usually valued in exclusively quantitative terms (more roads and wider ones). Surely it would make sense to keep the roads we have and plan them as one might a piazza, along aesthetic lines, that is.
Car parks are another sticking point. They are routinely hidden away underground as necessary evils, with all the limitations of that (there are so many holes one can dig). Instead, one might consider thinking of them as one might of a cathedral façade. The Marina City towers in Chicago and the Volkswagen Auto Türme in Wolfsburg offer fascinating models to toy with.
My maxim for the new year, and certainly not one to take literally, is to make love, not war, on cars.
mafalzon@hotmail.com