It’s with great pleasure that I realise that Transport Malta has placed the correct No Entry signs, albeit without the obligatory No Right Turn sign to stop vehicles from going north uphill along Kennedy Drive (the turn adjacent to the entrance to Kennedy Grove.)
However, it would seem that a CCTV camera should be placed on the junction to catch the considerable number of motorists who continue to turn right against the No Entry signs.
With great care, I thumbed through the Highway Code hoping to find an explanation as to why various contractors, or indeed members of the public, are happily placing red or black tape across road signs, the most common being No Entry or Give Way.
The motorist’s bible sheds no light on this increasingly common practice, and I have failed to find a relevant legal notice.
As obvious as it may be, the addition of a cross in black or red tape is to allow motorists to totally ignore the base sign, but I cannot accept that anyone other than a Transport Malta employee should be empowered to nullify the meaning of the base sign in such a crass and amateur fashion.
If, indeed, this cross signifies the temporary nullification of the base sign, at least let us have tape inscribed with Transport Malta so that we motoring doubters might assume that a degree of legality goes hand in hand with the tape.
Some months ago I shoved in a photo of one of the salt pan sheds with most of its wooden roof missing. Work had stopped on the refurbishment of the salt pans in April 2014. A smidgen before Christmas, the final bits of wooden roof were replaced, but when will the salt pans be finished, open to the public and in the business of producing salt once more?
This subject is not entirely irrelevant, as the new dual lane highway will pass immediately adjacent to the pans. This month’s photo shows the sort of trouble the road builders have discovered, as water seems to be encroaching on the roadworks between the junction of Naxxar Road with the Coast Road and on those unfortunate people living in the nearby village.
Residents are cut off when the two ramps they used to enter/exit their village were removed, leaving motorists and pedestrians an unpleasant journey past the nearby chapel and restaurant.
I am most concerned that the nearby Knights-age, fully restored building with its historically valuable Fougasse (stone cannon) in the vicinity may have four metres lopped off so that the four-lane highway may pass this narrow point. Or is a gantry going to be placed at this bend over the salt pan drainage canal to accommodate the four lanes envisaged?
Much interest was sparked when the twin roundabouts at the top of Birguma bypass and the junction with Parish Street and St Paul’s Street in Naxxar were made into one long junction.
It needed far more than fine-tuning to make the roundabouts function as Transport Malta intended. Slip roads would probably have helped. But I cannot escape from the dreadful fact that if we must give way to traffic on the right at both roundabouts, traffic lights would be the only cheap and cheerful way of allowing traffic relatively free movement.
The San Ġwann/Naxxar road is an arterial highway. The Birguma bypass has probably not been allocated either distributor or arterial status, meaning that the two roads are not, in fact, of equal importance.
Works were carried out on the Rabat/St Paul’s road to allow a filter lane at the junction with the link road round Ta Kali aerodrome. This has worked wonders and generally freed up traffic moving towards the Mosta roundabout, a worthwhile exercise as the volume of cars using this very busy arterial road goes up in a seemingly irreversible surge.
I still fear for a bad accident at the entrance/exit to the nearby large and busy petrol station, but luckily the experts who allowed this large complex to be placed on the side of a busy, narrow arterial road seem to have got the whole thing bang to rights. MPs along with the rest of us complain about traffic congestion. However, the government accrues vast sums of money from fuel tax, especially when the price of fuel drops at the well and not at the pump.
How would we all be affected, taxwise, if the price of fuel dropped, realistically, by 40 or so cents a litre?