This newspaper is to be congratulated for the excellent leading article ‘Incoherent transport strategy’ (October 1). The Times of Malta carried an account of the Prime Minister’s address the previous day in which “wider roads to handle an increase in public transport” were promised. Such a statement carries an in-built contradiction. If you widen roads and create more space for private car use, this will encourage more private car use and there will be no incentive for people to use public transport, even if free.
In allocating €700 million to adding lanes, creating more parking space and so on, the Transport Ministry was still failing to seek the correct, evidence-based solution. Building more roads to make private car use easier is no more than sweeping the traffic problem under the carpet.
When all the ‘road improvements’ are done and the money spent, we will simply have the same density of traffic jams on a grander scale.
This is compounded by the fact that we have had rotten public bus transport and neglected the potential ferry transport for decades. When dedicated bus lanes were created, Transport Malta took the easiest and most populist way out (for votes) and removed some of them to accommodate car drivers. Having been pandered to by successive governments, the typical Maltese driver will be reluctant to leave the comfort zone of the car, especially if roads continue to be widened and parking space increased.
We have recently been informed that €24 million were allocated to provide school transport whereby, it was claimed, school-bus transport “will be increased by 60 per cent”. Schoolchildren and their parents were then handed an amateurish easy-way-out fix which, as the editorial noted, is “botched”.
Such short-term, ‘band-aid’ fixes are at odds with the approach in progressive countries, which is to make roads safer for all, have efficient public transport and promote alternative mobility options.
Enabling youngsters to travel to school on their own initiative should be part of any well-informed policies. It will also determine a healthy attitude of our new generation to public transport and cycling.
However, as long as road conditions remain inhospitable to children, an unhealthy vicious circle will persist with parents not letting children make their own way to school on our dangerous roads (or buying them a bicycle).
Thus, coming generations will continue to grow conditioned to travelling unhealthily by private car. Such children will also be denied the joys, independence and adventures of riding a bicycle. They will grow up with little road sense and liable to become reckless car divers.
Surely, the primary aim of facilitating school transport should be to improve public transport for all and make roads safer so children are better able to make their own way to school. This helps promote the development of independence among children and so determine their attitude to use of alternative transport and cycling from an early age. As it is, our children are growing conditioned to be car-dependent.
Many factors have been found to influence children’s cognitive development, including the amount and quality of their sleep. A crucial element here is morning waking time.
Enabling youngsters to travel to school on their own initiative should be part of any well-informed policies
The proposal to stagger school bus trips into shifts or change opening and closing times of some State schools can result in a sub-group of children getting up extra early to get an earlier school bus.
Expecting children to wake up early to catch the school bus ignores the possibility of such children being deprived of sleep.
Usually, youngsters tend to go to bed late. Many will now have to wake up early to go to school and struggle with sleepiness every school morning.
Of course, it can be argued that parents should put their children to bed earlier but it does not work out like this.
Teen children are wired up differently and remain alert until late in the evening, nearer midnight. These, and other factors (especially, excessive on-screen time) conspire to determine inconsistent bedtime schedules and later bedtimes.
Transport Malta’s huge investment in school transport has resulted in ill-thought provision of school transport, which is counter-intuitive. As usual, approaches to a problem seem to have been drawn up in isolation and amount to no more than throwing money at a problem rather than working out an informed modern solution beneficial to all.
The present school transport policy will inevitably mean that many children will become sleep-deprived at an important stage of their lives – when they are developing. Studies on inconsistent sleeping times show that sleep deprivation is linked to impaired cognitive development and scholastic underachievement.
It is also suspected that this might have knock-on effects throughout children’s subsequent life-course.
The unhealthy, physically-inactive lifestyle of our children is reflected by the highest EU prevalence of obesity among our youth as a result of years of unhealthy, poorly-conceived health and transport policies.
Malta remains stubbornly at the bottom of every league when it comes to child health: Maltese children are the least physically active in the EU.
Only one in four (26 per cent) of Maltese children is physically active. Maltese children and adolescents have the highest overall prevalence of overweight and obesity in the EU and score among the highest in terms of childhood obesity in the world, with 25.4 per cent being pre-obese or obese and 7.9 per cent frankly obese.
Such an unhealthy lifestyle will result in a significant loss of ‘potential years of life’ (a measure of premature mortality) later in life.
George Debono is a retired doctor with a research background and a special interest in health and environment matters.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece