The scholastic year started again this week bringing with it the sight of hordes of sleepy children hastily dressed by even sleepier parents waiting for their school buses to ferry them towards their respective schools.

The joys of summer quickly disappear and where once our tempers were frayed by the scorching heat, the main culprit now seems to be the school-run.

My journey to school used to be of a pleasant nature. Pick-up was at about 7.15am and after a meandering voyage through several small villages, I would find myself passing through a dilapidated Cottonera – the area has now been transformed into a jewel – before being unceremoniously dumped at the school gates.

The commute was mostly calm, occasionally punctuated by the boredom of van bullies and some last-minute dash to finish off some homework.

Today, although my commute is significantly shorter, it seems to take an inordinate amount of time. Living in Sliema and working at the university I pass through the Ferries and every morning I am flabbergasted at the traffic jam that forms around Manoel Island.

This is hardly a surprise, since there are people like me, who instead of walking or cycling the 1.5-mile journey to university decide to take a car.

If idle hands are the devil’s workshop, then idling cars must be the devil’s showroom, because over the countless hours spent in a heaving lane while the bus lane to my left sits tantalisingly empty, beckoning me as a siren into the throes of a merciless traffic warden, I racked my brain to try and comprehend this traffic phenomenon.

It only took me 15 years of sitting in the same spot every morning to realise what part of the problem was. The first source of inspiration came when I was chatting with my barber, who explained how long it took him to get from Buġibba to Gżira. The second ‘light from heaven’ came as I sat in traffic at 6.45am at the same spot.

The idea seemed obvious and for the life of me I could not understand why I had not seen it before. I spent the next few days ‘geeking’ up on complex turbulent flow models and stochastic methods. All big words that really don’t mean anything except for the fact that ideally you want traffic to flow continuously at a constant speed.

If idle hands are the devil’s workshop, then idling cars must be the devil’s showroom

But it is deceptively simple. Months upon months I kept hearing that the problem was the Manoel Island bottleneck; the inevitable narrowing from two lanes to one lane and hence the monstrous birth of the bane of my life, the Ferries bus lane.

Traffic flow is very much akin to the flow of liquids and one can draw parallels with the flow of water from a wide part of the bottle to its narrow neck.

When the liquid is being poured slowly, the flow is smooth and continuous, but as you tilt the bottle further, you get to a point where it becomes turbulent and the flow stops and starts. Flow interruption is the equivalent of the acceleration and deceleration of cars in traffic, which inevitably leads to jams.

So for an ideal traffic flow, like liquid, we need this constant flow. It was thought the bus lane would achieve this, but this idea is painfully misguided, because the source of the traffic ‘turbulence’ is being caused further on past the petrol station at the junction of Triq il-Gżira with the Ferries, by vehicles that cross the steady flow of traffic.

My suggestions for avoiding this ‘crossing of the streams’ as Igor in Ghostbusters wisely counsels, is that traffic exiting from Triq il-Gżira and Triq Sir William Reid is made to turn towards Sliema and traffic heading towards Ta’ Xbiex is forbidden from crossing.

In this way the traffic streams are never crossed. Instead, traffic that wants to head towards Ta’ Xbiex should emerge from Triq San Ġorġ and not Triq il-Gżira.

Of course, one might say this is merely “rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic” and that the traffic issue is a symptom of an inept public transport system running on a poorly-designed road network exacerbated by a petrol-headed nation.

This may be the case and I am all for car-sharing and other ideas that may alleviate the traffic, such as a phased approach to school starting times.

I would also further extend this to shop and office opening times and incentivising the possibility to work from home. I mean, most people are texting or sending e-mails while sitting in traffic anyway so you may as well be sitting in bed!

You may notice I have shied away from the elephant in the room – the notorious public transport system. In fact, I think its title is also imprudent as from what I’ve seen it does anything but transport the public.

A more apt title would be a ‘public infuriation’ system. This is because I am a firm believer in a good and efficient public transport system, two qualities which seem to have eluded, not only the Maltese transport system, but various transport systems around the world.

So I’ll have to give that some more thought, undoubtedly while stuck in a traffic jam. Oh, and remind me to tell you about roundabouts and turbulence around those too.

Kristian Zarb Adami is a physics professor at the University of Malta.

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