Malta has had its fair share of major roadworks over the past decades, but it is fair to say that never has any pre-planning been as slick as that prepared for Kappara Junction.

It is also fair to say that never has any pre-planning been as crucial as this. Kappara roundabout handles around 90,000 cars every day – one in every 10 people if you assume that each person goes through there twice a day.

And it does so with an inefficiency that would be hilarious if it were not so pathetic. The only reason anyone gets through it at all is that years have taught us how to judge who will stop as the Highway Code intends, who will barge through avoiding eye contact, who will let you in and who will nudge out a metre at a time with a look of such innocence they deserve a halo.

Foreigners find it baffling and dangerous. For the Maltese, it is a quaint facet of what makes us Maltese. The problem is that it also translates to thousands of people spending an extra half hour getting from A to B.

The new junction is designed to make all that hassle obsolete, and the only criticism is that it has taken decades to materialise.

Now that it is truly going to happen, it seems churlish to complain about the year and a half of disruption – some phases of which will be more disruptive than others.

Transport Malta has launched a website (news.transport.gov.mt) explaining how traffic will flow through the new junction, giving detailed alternative routes during the construction phases.

It has done preparatory work on over a dozen roads that will act as diversions, stretching from Iklin to

. They are removing parking so that traffic can flow better and will set up a park-and-ride to help those affected. Warning signs about the works will start kilometres away, and there are signs at each corner to the end of the diversion (unlike previous instances where once you left the main road, you were left to guess where to turn next).

In theory, Transport Malta – with the contractor – has done all that it can, thinking things through stage by stage, insisting on proper planning, and heeding the feedback from almost all the stakeholders.

But Transport Malta is not merely transferring traffic from one road to another – as it did when it diverted traffic away from the Coast Road to the Salina Road.

In this case, it is diverting traffic from a nightmare junction to other roads which are already nightmares, from the Strand, to Sliema Road, to getting out of Swieqi. Removing parking and resurfacing roads will not even begin to make up for the lack of investment of the past years, with so many projects that never materialised.

We can only hope that it will all be worth it and the new €22.5 million junction will work so well that it will encourage commuters to use it, taking the pressure off other roads.

But in the meantime, commuters are going to be held to ransom by all those who hold up traffic for a fraction of a minute: the bus that does not quite pull into its bay, the car reversing into a parking space, a driver double parked to buy pastizzi, the container parked at the end of Msida Gardens marina reducing visibility of the road. Each of those will add to considerable frustration.

It is going to be a long, hot summer.

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