Revealing how inactive Europe is, The Lancet recently cited cycling as having a key role to play and that a national policy needs to be implemented to encourage non-motorised modes of transportation, such as walking and cycling.

Importantly, such policy must include an improved infrastructure. This is both prophetic and profound considering Malta’s second place in the obesity stakes, overtaking the UK. However, replacing cycle lanes with inferior it-would-be-nice-if-you-don’t-hit-the-cyclist advisory road markings and hoping it will magically offer as much protection is clearly not what The Lancet had in mind.

Dubbed as cyclist priority lanes, these bike wash schemes, much like Marsa or the central barrier project, fail to live up to the government’s promise to slash commuting times for all. The Żebbuġ scheme directs cyclists down a service road littered with speed humps, alongside a row of car doors. Hardly safer or more efficient! A poorly-conceived scheme from every angle, clearly lacking the benefit of hindsight from the same mistakes on the Mellieħa bypass or a full stakeholder consultation process, rather than the usual show-and-tell.

But most telling is the lack of national guidelines, clearly specifying sharrows and where they may be used or how speed humps need to be treated on cycle routes. One could honestly have created a better scheme for people on bicycles in Lego.

The irony of using shared use arrows (or sharrows) in the extreme left of a traffic lane, in the hope that road users ‘will learn to coexist’, must be glaringly obvious. The idea of sharrows is to place cyclists in the centre of the lane to help drivers learn to accept where they will be more visible, clear of door zones, and to impart an equal priority among road users.

Tucking sharrows (and cyclists) into the gutter does none of these things, possibly the reverse. Extending it from the Żebbuġ bypass on to a densely-trafficked roundabout is just begging for conflict and hardly what the European Mobility Week’s multimodal theme ‘Mix and Move’ had in mind.

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