Traffic Calming Measures in Malta - Really?

The Maltese Islands measure a mere 316 km² in total (Malta and Gozo being the largest of the archipelago: Malta: 246 km² and Gozo 67 km²). Of these 31% is arable land. The amount of cars on our 2,254 km of roads is ever on the increase. The National Statistics Office lists the following numbers of vehicles registered in 2000: 12,402 motorcycles, 189,123 passenger cars, 1,126 buses and coaches and 41,983 lorries. Driving in Malta has become next to impossible with much congestion wherever one goes, a situation bordering on utter chaos during the rush hours, by the numerous cranes used at building sites, by delivery vehicles blocking many roads and by the long-drawn process of even the most basic of road-works. Parking spaces are very hard to come by and one can spend considerable time circling roads in the hope of finding a slot where the car can be safely parked without fear of receiving a fine.

There is a definite increase in police and warden patrols in the past few years. People's cars are ticketed for the slightest "contravention" and the medical profession is not spared the whip either. Doctors are routinely ticketed despite "doctor-on-call" stickers, the special permits from the Commissioner of Police and a stiff warning from the Medical Association of Malta of action being taken by the doctors in the respective areas if this trend continues! AND IT HAS!!! Hence, this matter is expected to be one of the priorities of the new MAM Council due to take up office in July 2004.

The stresses experienced by drivers, who use the roads every day out of sheer necessity, are enormous and are leading to more road-rage than has ever been experienced. As I right this article, my own father is recovering in hospital after major surgery needed after falling victim to an aggressive driver whose road rage could have landed him in hospital instead! The local councils are continuously introducing what they call "road calming measures" or "deterrents" to combat this potentially lethal affliction of motorists. I believe that these are having or are likely to have the opposite effect. The measures include:

• Traffic Lights every 100m or so of most main roads; the "Christmas tree" roundabout at Gżira is ludicrous generating more traffic jams than it averts!

• Roundabout and central strips abound in the most illogical of places

• Sleeping Policemen that are poorly maintained rendering them invisible, too high and pretty wide. They not only catch the motorist unawares but inflict much damage to our cars... and our vertebral column

• The myriad of traffic signs that have outnumbered the flies and mosquitoes that infest the Islands in the hot summer months: no waiting, no stopping, no parking, reserved for disabled, reserved from MPs (!!!), speed limits of 35 km/hr on one of our major arterial roads on the pretext that a bridge is thought to be structurally unsafe. These are constantly requiring the motorist to take his/her eyes off the road

• Wide streets that have been turned into one-way roads

• Double yellow lines along wide side-roads reducing precious parking space needlessly and increasing the frustration of those that need to park their car in places other than the middle of the road

• Spy cameras

Malta's traffic law-enforcement gives one the impression that one is living in a police-state. How can one expect motorists to drive calmly and safely with this massive overdose of restriction?

What needs to be done... but isn't!

• The importation of cars, particularly the larger ones, needs to be restricted. Of course, this would pinch the interests of major, influential businessmen so it's unlikely to happen.

• More parking spaces should be made available especially to those whose work necessitates the use of a private vehicle (e.g. doctors, salesmen, deliverymen).

• An age limit to drivers should come into force. Currently, anyone who gets a doctor's "fit to drive" certificate can continue enjoying the use of private cars.

• The bus service needs a radical shake up. Buses should be smaller (not bigger!) and cleaner; the service should be frequent, regular and punctual; buses need to be accessible to the old and the disabled; adequate and well maintained bus shelters displaying time-tables of bus services in the area.

• There should be incentives for the use of public transport or group usage of private cars.

• Road works ought to be carried out expeditiously and during off-peak periods, at night if necessary.

• Underground service tunnels should be constructed wherever possible to prevent the necessity of having to dig up, at times freshly surfaced, roads whenever something new needs to be passed through or repair works need to be carried out.

• Permits for cranes on construction sites ought to be limited to one for any particular area. Adequate (at least 2) alternative routes should be ensured when road works or construction works are likely to create an obstacle to the flow of traffic.

• The number of traffic signs should be cut down to a bare minimum. The few left should be clearly displayed and not allowed to become covered by vegetation (wild or cultivated) or lying inconspicuously flat against some shoddy wall!

Wardens and police should be there to help the citizen, not to show their teeth. Common sense should prevail - the law is supposedly made for man - not man for the law! The measures being introduced are there not to calm motorists at all... but rather to guarantee an increase in revenue from fines for the bankrupt exchequer... Now we're talking!!!!

This is just a brief synopsis on the subject. Your contribution may shed more light into the problems facing us defenceless motorists and any suggestions may prove invaluable. Our streets and motor-ways require more than just an aesthetic make-over! They need radical surgery and the local councils' hysteria needs to be dampened down. Let our voice be heard!

You may wish to send photos of situations relating to this subject. If you do have any to share with visitors to this web-site, please send them in jpg format to me.

References:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0107763.html

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/europe/malta/

http://www.doi.gov.mt/en/islands/location.asp

http://www.fact-index.com/g/go/gozo_island.html

http://www.um.edu.mt/pub/planauthsurv.html

http://www.nso.gov.mt/publications/Transport/2001/road10.htm

http://www.mam.org.mt/noticeboarddetail.asp?i=223&c=4

This article featured in the English newspaper The Daily Telegraph. It seems like Malta is heading the same way!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/06/03/do0301.xml

I've had enough of being told what I can't do with my car
By Stephen Robinson
(Filed: 03/06/2004)

One of the things that attracted me to the north London mews into which we moved three years ago had nothing to do with the house itself. It was the parking regulations, or rather the lack of them. Our mews is a little cobbled private road, which means that the traffic zealots employed by the London Borough of Camden may not set foot in it. Occasionally I see them sucking their pens and staring wistfully down the mews from the public road, but they cannot lay a finger or a ticket on our little black Golf.

You might think the idea of a dozen or so Londoners squeezing their Volvos and Range Rovers into limited spaces would cause chaos, but the private system, developed over years and based on custom and courtesy, works magnificently. We cheerfully move our cars around to accommodate others, and get our guests to leave little notes – "Just visiting number three". Not only does the system work, but it spares us the grief of dealing with a Labour-controlled London borough.

We don't have to pay £90 a year to the licensed bandits in Camden town hall to park outside our own home, or answer impertinent questions from "Camden Parking Solutions" about our ethnic origin, or be reminded that our council tax bills are being squandered on translating parking permit application forms into Welsh and Bengali.

The great residents' parking racket, which has now expanded into virtually every little town in the country, is a perfect illustration of how the motorist is fleeced by the Government and local authorities. First, a "problem", lack of parking spaces, is identified. The "solution" is a permit system, initially set at a peppercorn rate, which soon becomes yet another gigantic exercise in social engineering and a lucrative stealth tax. Exactly the same procedure was adopted with speed cameras and related "traffic calming" measures. A few years ago, the Government started funding "pilot projects" for cameras at known accident spots. No one could complain at that: speeding is against the law, and it would save the lives of "our kids". But now, hey presto, we have a £200 million a year industry catching 1.5 million generally law-abiding motorists, while chief constables across the country wonder why the middle classes suddenly hate the police.

The current fuss about rises in the forecourt price of petrol is a sideshow against the central issue of how successive governments have identified the motorist as the single greatest cash cow for the welfare state. The daylight robbery is wrapped up in vaguely "green" rhetoric: cars cause pollution and accidents, the Government wants to reduce emissions to meet some ill-defined global targets, and never mind that the motorists of Britain are being persecuted even as the government of China, as a matter of policy, is actually encouraging its population to become car owners. Occasionally, the scale of the Government's looting is laid so bare that even Gordon Brown begins to appear rattled.

The Times devoted much of yesterday's front page to a report that the Chancellor was moving to save the motorist from petrol at £1 a litre by "hitting the phones" to ministers of oil producing states, pleading with them to agree to raise production at today's Opec meeting in Beirut. Purnomo Yusgiantoro, the Indonesian president of Opec, was only one important figure in the international oil world to be contacted by Mr Brown, underscoring the Chancellor's determination, aides said, "to leave nothing to chance".

This is a lovely image, Mr Brown sitting in the Treasury, feverishly punching his phone, saving the motorist from the consequences of Middle East instability. Is it too suspicious to see in Mr Brown's stagey public activity an implicit suggestion that the Chancellor must act to save the British motorist from the unfortunate results of the Prime Minister's adventure in Iraq?

But in reality, the Chancellor has much more control over the cost of petrol on British forecourts than any of the Opec ministers he spoke to yesterday. Back in 1990, taxes and duty amounted to 60 per cent of the price of a litre of unleaded; today the figure is 76 per cent. In other words, the next time you spend £40 filling up your car, £30 is going straight to the Treasury, and just £10 to the garage, the refinery, the shippers, and the companies which find the oil and pump it out of the ground.

The overall figures of the Government's take from motorists are even more extraordinary. The AA has produced a cost analysis of Mondeo man, driving a 1.8LX model 10,000 miles a year. Including the £165 for the road fund licence, about £21 "premium tax" on his insurance policy, VAT on repairs, servicing, and tyres, and about £900 in duty on petrol, Mondeo man is paying just under £5,000 a year to run his car, £1,500 of which goes straight to the Government. This does not include residents' parking permits or fines for passing cameras at five miles over the speed limit.

It suits the Government to portray driving as essentially selfish, rather than a necessity to millions, because then motorists can be exploited for revenue purposes and generally treated with contempt. Witness two related stories in yesterday's Daily Telegraph. Drivers using the A483 in Wales have been held up for seven years by a temporary traffic light at roadworks that have not actually started. Meanwhile, the Driving Standards Agency has been forced to concede that the wait for a driving test in some parts of the country now exceeds 13 weeks. And to think that environmentalists talk with a straight face about the power of the over-mighty "car lobby".

The Government hates private car ownership for precisely the reason that millions of people will not give it up. A car gives us freedom and independence, it liberates us from the worst excesses of government incompetence, and spares us the indignity of lousy public transport. The Government responds by trying to curb us with speed bumps and cameras and parking restrictions, for it resents the freedom the car gives us, and brands us selfish. If you laugh when you hear ministers talk about "joined up" transport policies, or national walking strategies, and if you recoil at being called a "stakeholder" in New Labour's nightmare nanny state, you have a solemn duty: keep on driving.