Personally, I believe that our vociferous Minister of Roads has been hoping that he would be jerked out of the ministerial 'perch' and remustered, in fine military fashion, to the position of CEO of the Transport Authority. This is a position ideally suited for a man able to pronounce and dictate, charm and beguile.
For, my brothers and sisters, the position of CEO in the Malta Transport Authority (not Public Transport Authority, as various journalists deem it to be) means being plunged into a hornets' nest, a job calling for more than a modicum of the superhuman, i.e. in this case 'political' skills, as well as the sound technical background that one presumes someone like a minister/architect would have at his or her fingertips.
Transport and mechanical skills would also be of more than passing help. True to its normal, bad-mannered form, neither I nor any of the eight remaining driving test examiners have received an apology from management of the ADT for the character assassination inherent in the article 'Young motorist claims "institutionalised" abuse at ADT', which I waffled on about last month.
Sadly, since then the most experienced foreign examiner (14 years a driving instructor in London) has given up and returned to the UK - I know he will be sorely missed.
On an encouraging note, the famous 'Swallow Garage' bus has been banned from working for the ETC; no, don't ask. Perhaps common sense will prevail and this, allegedly, mechanically demanding, and not very satisfactory example, of the coach-makers' art will be relegated to that area reserved for scrapped heavy vehicles, possibly somewhere off Dingli Cliffs, and will no longer be seen outside the office of our local driving examiners.
Call me old-fashioned, but I cannot for the life of me see why Swallow Garage motors still turn up most regularly with pupils for a driving exam. Common sense would have dictated a name change at the very least after the scandal surrounding some Swallow driving instructors and some ADT driving examiners before June of last year.
Speed cameras revisited
One may have read that the Attard speed/safety camera is, or has been removed from its housing.
Common sense would say that, if this is so, it's because the equipment is expensive and not enough drivers are being caught going too fast. Fine, leave the housing in place and move the camera to another housing, and then, as sure as night follows day, the motoring mass will speed up again and the whole exercise can be gone through once more.
In the same way, put the speed limit up to an easy-to-understand 50 km/h on Xemxija Hill, St Paul's Bay, and then the chief warden, working with the councils and the ADT, can swap the one camera from Attard to St Paul's and back as the speeding public dictates.
Two for the price of one; and we would then be working exactly in line with what happens in the UK. Travel the A40 from Cheltenham to Oxford if you can't believe it happens.
Traffic management
In its basic form, road signs and carriageway markings, traffic calming and pedestrian facilities along with one-way traffic systems are something of a forte, as I spent my working life from January 1996 to the arrival of the ADT attempting nothing other than helping councils, and to a minor extent the Roads Department, in establishing a working compromise between cost and good working practices in traffic management techniques.
This was only possible because the chairman of the Traffic Control Board was the indefatigable Major Peter Ripard, and I operated as his adjutant. He and I shared friendship and respect when it came to traffic management, and between us we got most things right first time round and had a grand working relationship with all the councils that genuinely needed and asked for our help.
I got one road sign wrong, however, and try as I might, failed to persuade Roads Department personnel or the management of the Marsa Garage, as it then was, to change it. Sadly, it seems to have gone into perpetuity and is now sprouting more and more often on our new roads.
It is, of course, the "End of Speed Limit" sign, which will either be "National speed limit applies", and this is correctly found on a circular sign with a black ring, white infill and a black diagonal running from 8-2 (on the clock face) or a circular sign, with black ring, white centre, prevailing speed limit and a series of black lines running from 7-1.
This sign is clearly shown in the Highway Code, a small but important aid to drivers and the Traffic Management team, people who obviously know far better than to refer to any form of documented information when putting up signs, as the wonderfully inadequate sign reproduced here, which the experts seem to think refers to an end of 45 km/h speed limit shows.
Before Traffic Management throws the proverbial tantrum and collectively goes 'ballistic', I would remind them all that, even when contractors place road signs on arterial and distributor roads, it is still the direct responsibility of the Traffic Management team to ensure the correct signs are in place.
Apart from the fact that there is a red ring, making the instruction shown compulsory, and the diagonals are too few, too widely spaced and don't by any stretch of the imagination run from 7-1, this sign actually appears to instruct drivers to go faster than 45 km/h, which is very different from telling them that the 45 km/h speed limit has ended.
My last gripe this month with Traffic Management concerns the monumentally hazardous pedestrian crossing close to the exit/entry to Chadwick Lakes on the Rabat-Mosta road. In those wild moments of the night when it may be deemed important to place a crossing on an extremely busy road it would be an imperative that it was more than adequately lit (which it isn't) and that, at the very least, it must have flashing yellow/orange, Belisha beacons, better still pelican, or toucan lights.
Somewhere in the current Traffic Management 'book of words', if memory serves me well, it waffles on about crossings being placed in the immediate vicinity of a roundabout or 'without' a radius of 150 metres from the roundabout. The Chadwick Lakes road crossing is admittedly a borderline distance from the nearby roundabout, but in the name of common sense and sanity, bearing in mind any walkers will be keen types, and the crossing that was deemed correct is totally hazardous, it really must be scrapped before pedestrians come to grief, and placed within the permitted minimum distance from the roundabout.
Traffic Management is based on: knowledge, experience, and most importantly common sense, a rare commodity if my not inconsiderable experience over the period 2002-2006 is anything to go by.
For, my brothers and sisters, the position of CEO in the Malta Transport Authority (not Public Transport Authority, as various journalists deem it to be) means being plunged into a hornets' nest, a job calling for more than a modicum of the superhuman, i.e. in this case 'political' skills, as well as the sound technical background that one presumes someone like a minister/architect would have at his or her fingertips.
Transport and mechanical skills would also be of more than passing help. True to its normal, bad-mannered form, neither I nor any of the eight remaining driving test examiners have received an apology from management of the ADT for the character assassination inherent in the article 'Young motorist claims "institutionalised" abuse at ADT', which I waffled on about last month.
Sadly, since then the most experienced foreign examiner (14 years a driving instructor in London) has given up and returned to the UK - I know he will be sorely missed.
On an encouraging note, the famous 'Swallow Garage' bus has been banned from working for the ETC; no, don't ask. Perhaps common sense will prevail and this, allegedly, mechanically demanding, and not very satisfactory example, of the coach-makers' art will be relegated to that area reserved for scrapped heavy vehicles, possibly somewhere off Dingli Cliffs, and will no longer be seen outside the office of our local driving examiners.
Call me old-fashioned, but I cannot for the life of me see why Swallow Garage motors still turn up most regularly with pupils for a driving exam. Common sense would have dictated a name change at the very least after the scandal surrounding some Swallow driving instructors and some ADT driving examiners before June of last year.
Speed cameras revisited
One may have read that the Attard speed/safety camera is, or has been removed from its housing.
Common sense would say that, if this is so, it's because the equipment is expensive and not enough drivers are being caught going too fast. Fine, leave the housing in place and move the camera to another housing, and then, as sure as night follows day, the motoring mass will speed up again and the whole exercise can be gone through once more.
In the same way, put the speed limit up to an easy-to-understand 50 km/h on Xemxija Hill, St Paul's Bay, and then the chief warden, working with the councils and the ADT, can swap the one camera from Attard to St Paul's and back as the speeding public dictates.
Two for the price of one; and we would then be working exactly in line with what happens in the UK. Travel the A40 from Cheltenham to Oxford if you can't believe it happens.
Traffic management
In its basic form, road signs and carriageway markings, traffic calming and pedestrian facilities along with one-way traffic systems are something of a forte, as I spent my working life from January 1996 to the arrival of the ADT attempting nothing other than helping councils, and to a minor extent the Roads Department, in establishing a working compromise between cost and good working practices in traffic management techniques.
This was only possible because the chairman of the Traffic Control Board was the indefatigable Major Peter Ripard, and I operated as his adjutant. He and I shared friendship and respect when it came to traffic management, and between us we got most things right first time round and had a grand working relationship with all the councils that genuinely needed and asked for our help.
I got one road sign wrong, however, and try as I might, failed to persuade Roads Department personnel or the management of the Marsa Garage, as it then was, to change it. Sadly, it seems to have gone into perpetuity and is now sprouting more and more often on our new roads.
It is, of course, the "End of Speed Limit" sign, which will either be "National speed limit applies", and this is correctly found on a circular sign with a black ring, white infill and a black diagonal running from 8-2 (on the clock face) or a circular sign, with black ring, white centre, prevailing speed limit and a series of black lines running from 7-1.
This sign is clearly shown in the Highway Code, a small but important aid to drivers and the Traffic Management team, people who obviously know far better than to refer to any form of documented information when putting up signs, as the wonderfully inadequate sign reproduced here, which the experts seem to think refers to an end of 45 km/h speed limit shows.
Before Traffic Management throws the proverbial tantrum and collectively goes 'ballistic', I would remind them all that, even when contractors place road signs on arterial and distributor roads, it is still the direct responsibility of the Traffic Management team to ensure the correct signs are in place.
Apart from the fact that there is a red ring, making the instruction shown compulsory, and the diagonals are too few, too widely spaced and don't by any stretch of the imagination run from 7-1, this sign actually appears to instruct drivers to go faster than 45 km/h, which is very different from telling them that the 45 km/h speed limit has ended.
My last gripe this month with Traffic Management concerns the monumentally hazardous pedestrian crossing close to the exit/entry to Chadwick Lakes on the Rabat-Mosta road. In those wild moments of the night when it may be deemed important to place a crossing on an extremely busy road it would be an imperative that it was more than adequately lit (which it isn't) and that, at the very least, it must have flashing yellow/orange, Belisha beacons, better still pelican, or toucan lights.
Somewhere in the current Traffic Management 'book of words', if memory serves me well, it waffles on about crossings being placed in the immediate vicinity of a roundabout or 'without' a radius of 150 metres from the roundabout. The Chadwick Lakes road crossing is admittedly a borderline distance from the nearby roundabout, but in the name of common sense and sanity, bearing in mind any walkers will be keen types, and the crossing that was deemed correct is totally hazardous, it really must be scrapped before pedestrians come to grief, and placed within the permitted minimum distance from the roundabout.
Traffic Management is based on: knowledge, experience, and most importantly common sense, a rare commodity if my not inconsiderable experience over the period 2002-2006 is anything to go by.