“Half” the contractors complained about a proposal to bar heavy vehicles from the roads during the rush hour, Malta Developers’ Association president Sandro Chetcuti said.
“We have literally been bombarded with e-mails and phone calls over the past few days from dozens of contractors complaining about this idea,” he said.
Mr Chetcuti was reacting to a suggestion in a recent White Paper on rush hour traffic, which floats the idea of removing heavy vehicles from roads during peak congestion times.
The suggestion does not delve into how this would work as the consultation document is mostly based on traffic solutions linked to schools.
Mr Chetcuti said the MDA had written to Transport Malta asking for a meeting to express developers’ reservations on the heavy vehicle restriction idea. This, he said, would have serious repercussions on the industry.
“It simply won’t work. Construction can’t begin before the morning traffic; we start as early as legally permissible. It can’t go on into the evening either, so what are we supposed to do? Miss out on several hours of work,” he said.
Mr Chetcuti added that certain “time sensitive” material, such as concrete, could not be taken to a construction site and left there until the workers arrived.
Developers were not the only ones to have an issue with the plan.
The Chamber of Commerce, Enterprise and Industry last week hit out at the suggestion, describing it as a “knee jerk reaction”. It said the 14-page White Paper referred to delivery vans and only “vaguely” suggested that “services delivered by heavy vehicles should not coincide with morning traffic”. It said it felt that “the lifeline of Malta’s business community deserved more than one line.”
V. J. Salomone executive director Victor Galea also said the proposal would “mess things up”. He said the company, which distributes thousands of consumer products across the island every week, already started operations early enough.
“We send out our delivery vans at about 6am. More often than not, businesses depend on receiving these goods before their customers start walking through the door,” he said.
Meanwhile, Transport Minister Joe Mizzi said the government had already toyed with the idea of stopping heavy vehicles from operating during the rush hour in the past. Although he was reluctant to comment too much on the matter, he said the government was “close to a final decision”.
He would not say what the government had in store. Mr Mizzi said the next stage would be to discuss the proposal in Parliament when it reconvened next month.