Traffic is a constant nightmare on this little island of ours and I, for one, cannot wait to see the end of the Kappara project so that maybe someday the morning commute does not take so ridiculously long as it does now. To be frank, the project seems to be progressing at a steady pace and it felt pretty good to drive along the freshly-tarmacked slipway too.

There was an equally feel-good factor in Parliamentary Secretary Ian Borg’s announcement that Transport Malta is one of the biggest beneficiaries of EU funds as he stood in front of the flyover under construction.

However, to think of new junctions, flyovers and whatever concrete and tarmac marvels as an intelligent means to relieve congestion in this country is naive and shortsighted. Such projects are good at easing traffic and congestion but only for a relatively short period of time.

Congestion moves from one place to another unless an administration manages to get funding so that more space and land is taken up to widen or add roads to the existing network.

What will be the end result?

Increased mayhem, because building a flyover does not address the main culprit of traffic congestion in Malta: the number of cars on the roads. On the contrary, such projects will only fuel the need for everyone to go anywhere by car.

At the heart of traffic congestion in Malta lies years of inadequate planning and foresight with regard to the infrastructural needs of the country.

Malta needs an immediate overhaul of the transport and infrastructure system by introducing alternative means of transport

Though blaming previous administrations for the prevailing situation will not help me or anybody else shorten the daily commute, one cannot but notice that the mayhem is continuously eroding Malta’s little remaining charm as a Mediterranean country and costing it millions of euros every year.

What our country so badly needs is an immediate overhaul of the transport and infrastructure system by introducing alternative means of transport. Introducing new means of transportation, such as a metro system, and marrying them with existent ones is undoubtedly a lengthy, expensive and painstaking process but, nevertheless, it is urgently needed.

Speaking of new means of transport, I cannot wait to read all about the Nationalist Party’s proposal of overhauling the transport system. One cannot ignore the irony in the fact that the 20-year time frame the PN says such an exercise would require is just a few years less than the period the same party spent in office in recent history.

Why did it not decide to embark on such a project earlier? To generate serious public interest in this proposal may be difficult, to say the least, given the PN’s track record.

Sadly, the present administration has not been exactly innovative either in taking concrete measures to start this shift in transportation. While small efforts, such as the introduction of a tidal lane in Paola and intelligent real-time signs, are plausible they fall seriously short of addressing the traffic situation and do not seem part of a comprehensive strategy to do so.

So much so, that, as the present legislature approaches its end, there still has been no start whatsoever of a plan to reduce traffic and introduce new means of transport.

This call may easily fall on deaf ears but as another busy summer with an influx of tourists lies just around the corner, and my daily commute is doomed not to get any shorter, this is my two cents’ worth at pressing for the need of a radical change in our transport system.

And we need it now.

Lee Bugeja Bartolo is an aerospace engineering graduate.

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