The writing on the wall

I have no doubt that the traffic problem is the talk of town. When people lose their flight and pilots do not even turn up at the airport in time because of traffic, it has to be a crisis.

Like most people I spent a good two to three hours stuck in traffic and unable
to move. And of course, the blame
was apportioned and laid at the feet of government: to be more precise of Joseph Muscat.

Government can no longer blame the past anymore. It can no longer blame the previous administration for simply everything that goes wrong.

There are of course many reasons for the mess and the gridlock. We are the first ones to blame. We are in love with the car, and depend on the car for everything.

But if we want to be true to ourselves, the real issue is Malta as we know it. It starts from the very simple matter that children get chauffeured across the island to schools, both church and private, that are not located in their own hometowns. De la Salle, St Dorothy’s, San Andrea, St Michael’s and others are placed in different localities making most people dependent on private transportation, whether it’s the parents or minibuses, to get there on time.

In most European cities and villages, school-children also walk to their schools or get on a public bus. But transporting children in private cars to schools is
also happening with many government schools. Most families are averse to walking their children to school.

In designing the road network around these schools no one has looked at the impact of this much traffic. The end result is a gridlock around these schools.

At the very same time that schools are taking in hundreds of children, the whole island is undergoing a logistical nightmare. Cement trucks traverse arterial roads, wardens block main roads, delivery vans service groceries and supermarkets, and ‘scammels’ – that wonderful Maltese word to describe garbage trucks – stop and start in village nodes.

If that was not enough to generate chaos, then there is the general state of our roads, a legacy of incompetence that we seem unable to escape. Because the failure to construct roads that can take torrential rain remains the mystery of this country: no road seems unable to withstand the effects of our storms.

We have to consider that the solution for the government of the day and yesteryear’s has never been that of dis-incentivising car usage or even reducing car usage. Because the solution does not lie in the construction of more roads and flyovers.

Suggestions that we should invest in monorail and an underground transport system are met with derision. Pity that the same zeal applied to the Gozo bridge – an idea that would actually increase the use of cars in Gozo – is not applied to public transportation ideas.

And it seems that roads minister Joe Mizzi is of course at a loss what to do next. The mere idea of increasing car license fees – which is in principle a polluter-pays tax – or dis-incentivising the use of large cars, does not seem to be on the cards. It appears that the Muscat administration finds it too difficult to impose fiscal measures to discourage car usage.

But we will have to go down that road at some point. The shift to public transport has to be aided somewhat. And we are still not even bringing into the equation the serious effect of transport-derived pollutants on our health. Transport is the number one cause of emissions in Malta: it cannot be that many of our serious ailments are not originating from the air pollution created.

A culture change will have to follow: people must be pushed into car-pooling, into using more varied means of public transport and to simply jump on the bus. Easier said than done, surely.

There has to be some serious thinking. We cannot go on imagining that irrespective of the exponential growth in cars, we won’t ever arrive at a gridlock. We’re already here. And at the end of the day, it very much hinges on how far Joseph Muscat’s understanding of the problem can produce a real, long-term solution.

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Before you start holding your breath... when you get a troop of car enthusiasts who are being blessed by this administration in suggesting the possibility of a motorsports racecourse, then I really have to cringe.

The worst part is that the government is not even ruling out using ODZ land. Really now... is anyone in government even thinking? Do they want another battle?

What I can’t understand is why a small island like Malta, compressed as we are on this rock, must necessarily emulate activities that are land-hungry simply because they exist elsewhere.

What’s next? An expression of interest for a ski resort like Dubai’s artificial ski slopes in some soulless shopping mall?

F**k the race-track. We simply cannot afford losing the space. This country cannot afford to lose any more land.

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I cannot quite understand dissident Labour MP Marlene Farrugia. A KullHadd report on the allegedly illegal occupation of public land by Bidnija’s bile queen was reported – as one does – on maltatodaycom.mt. It attracted over 600 comments, including those from the sovereign of bile.

Naturally enough, many of the commentators do not like her, regurgitating in exemplary fashion. Until Marlene Farrugia came to her unexpected rescue. Why? Only God knows. The unruly commentators turned their wrath over to Farrugia.

Wrong, all wrong.

But I did question why Farrugia would want to enter into the senseless debate. The bile queen has been the author of verbal diarrhoea and lies about people for years, many of whom were not public figures but just subjects of derision for her Nationalist prejudice. Not once did Marlene ever speak up.

I’d hazard that Farrugia is a prima donna who likes attracting attention, just like others in politics did before her under the influence of their inflated ego. And it’s for that reason that I find her superficial, inconsistent, and contradictory.

Her discomfort with being a Labour MP should be enough reason for her to leave the party, especially if many Labourites do not adore her.

She may be right on a number of issues when she complains that Labour is not the party it made itself out to be. But is she really even comfortable to be on a party of the left, when she is herself not on the left-wing?

Like our traffic confusion, this political landscape is peppered with self-publicists who have nothing better to do with themselves. It is a special form of voyeurism that we should all avoid.