Politicians who favour a metro rail system for traffic-congested Malta are on the right track.

This is a much needed infrastructural investment. A former civil engineer expat friend of mine insists that digging tunnels for a metro system is now, with modern machinery, a relatively fast affair.

Metro links to the airport, to Mater Dei Hospital and perhaps to Gozo would be envisaged, but the Malta metro should have planning and financing precedence to the Gozo link – the bulk of the population and traffic problem is in Malta. Investment in other road infrastructure, such as underpasses and flyovers, is also needed.

However, all this infrastructural investment must go hand in hand with increasing restrictions on the use of the private car. This will require politicians of the ‘stiff-spine’, not the populist type. Why? Free street parking in busy towns must end.  Working at a hospital at Hyde Park Corner, central London in the early 1970s, I could park my car on a pavement for free if I got there early enough. There is no way you can now park anywhere for free in central London, and residents pay a substantial annual fee for permission to park in their own street.

This concentrates the mind on whether one needs the hassle and expense of keeping a car when the Underground, buses and taxi services are efficient. Malta will need to start thinking along these lines or there will be total traffic log-jam in the foreseeable future.