Consider these three images, each a visual parable about our current transport predicament. The wide open ground beside the Floriana football field: once a space associated with physical sport and activity, now a huge car park. What better image of the private car’s stealthy takeover of our public spaces? (Private car use accounts for 84 per cent of all traffic on the roads and 75 per cent of all ‘mobility movements’, including walking.)
It doesn’t just occupy. It expects us to take it as natural that its imperatives take priority over others. It is a benevolent dictator serving us, even while the authorities deplore physical inactivity and the rise of obesity.
But it’s not the authorities’ complete fault: in legalising such parking spaces, they respond to popular demand. Malta has the fifth-highest proportion of vehicles per capita in the world.
Meanwhile, that popular pressure clamours for short-term solutions to pressing problems, even though in the longer term those solutions are contrary to our self-interest.
Next, in Nadur, a state-of-the-art charging point for electric cars – alas, in the pedestrianised part of the piazza. Or, if you like, the charging point in Gżira, opposite Manoel Island, likewise inaccessible.
The latter may have been moved since it was pointed out to me. But the parable is about how these things arise in the first place: the lack of joined-up thinking, so that one good thing cancels another.
Finally, consider a road sign intended to get car drivers to respect cyclists and leave enough space by the kerb. It’s a standard sign you can find in mainland Europe – and there’s the rub.
The sign was designed for roads where the kerb is on the right. Transplanted to Malta, without adaptation to our left-side driving, the sign actually conveys the message that cars should hug the kerb while cyclists should steer for the middle of the road…
The real transport problem is not congestion. It’s sustainable development
We all could mention other favourite nonsensical road signs but the point here is not to establish another ‘Only in Malta’ collection.
A mistake like this – sloppy standards or a glitch in the supervision system – doesn’t necessarily arise because the people at the top don’t know what they’re doing. It’s a managerial not a strategic issue. However, because of the cynicism that such road signs engender, public faith – that the authorities know what they’re doing – is undermined.
But keeping public faith strong is crucial for strategic reasons.
We are rapidly coming to an end of the list of easy things we can do to improve traffic congestion. Soon we will need to embark on more difficult measures, which will initially hurt private car users. (You can’t clear the road for buses without restricting driving and parking spaces for private cars, for example.)
The authorities will need all the public support they can get to embed a more rational transportation system. The transition to a more sustainable, less congested system will temporarily involve more congestion for some.
If the public doesn’t have faith that the authorities know what they’re doing, the pressure for the politicians to get into reverse gear might become overwhelming.
Between them, these three parables encapsulate the overarching messages of the Transport Authority’s master plan published earlier this year. These interrelated problems have a long history, going back decades, at least to the 1970s. Some of the solutions have long been known. They might even have been tried, although fitfully.
In other words, the real transport problem is not congestion. It’s sustainable development: the use of integrated resource management (thanks to ICT) and the political will to embark on a course of action and to stick to it, which in itself permits better financial planning. Better planning is usually cheaper.
We should welcome the publication of the first transport master plan – forced upon us by EU law but which eluded the previous administration. But all the joined-up strategic understanding of the issues (addressing the problems highlighted by the second parable) will come to naught without public support (the problems highlighted by the first parable).
And the public will not support the necessary changes unless it learns how to recognise how our current predicament is actively counterproductive to their life right now. Unless we realise how much of our plans are currently frustrated by the time lost on the road, we might never learn the lesson of the first parable.
We might acknowledge the fact that our behaviour is counterproductive but not enough to act on it. We will settle for an unsustainable transport system as fate.
Which means settling for an eventual breakdown. By 2025, according to the master plan, the economic cost of traffic congestion and health costs related to pollution will amount to €584 million per year. Some experts think that number is too high, but you get the idea.
All societies have a deadly flaw; all come to an end. Temples to ashes, palaces to dust. No paradise is exempt. In the stained mirror of history, Malta should see itself darkly.
By the early 18th century, the population of Easter Island had dropped to circa 2,500 people from a high of 15,000 only a century earlier. The collective epitaph for the Easter Islanders could be this: a people dependent on the forest who compulsively chopped it down.
Fifty-four years ago, Charles de Gaulle pronounced his lapidary epitaph for the glory that once was France: “How can one govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?”
Where our public spaces and public goods are concerned, we are combining the (admittedly attractive) unruliness of French cheesemakers with the (admittedly rational, once you study it) self-destructive behaviour of the Easter Islanders.
Our current transport quagmire needn’t be fate. Thank goodness, because our anarchic approach to transport is helping to destroy everything we love from our children’s health to our ecosystem. We’re undermining the foundations of our conviviality and economy.
On our current showing, what epitaph will future historians write for us?
Here’s my guess: the Maltese were charming and streetwise except where it mattered – in the streets.
ranierfsadni@europe.com