Monorail proposal dissected on user-friendly portal

The possibility of a monorail service in Malta has been something of a transport-related pie in the sky for quite some time, with several maverick proposals popping up over the years to present a solution to Malta’s persistent public transport problem. 

Now that the government has hinted the proposal could solidify into a bona fide reality if the stars match up in its favour, a duo of civil engineering graduates have set up a lucid and comprehensive website outlining the nuts and bolts of the (theoretical) process, presenting speculative blueprints of routes, financial breakdowns and technical details of potential vehicles to be employed. 

Spurred on by the announcement that the government will be taking the monorail proposal seriously this time around – a €1.49 billion monorail proposal was submitted by Malta to the European Investment Initiative last December – Luke Lapira and Justin Zarb have set up www.maltarail.org. In their own words, Maltarail aims to examine “some architectural and technical aspects of a hypothetical monorail infrastructure in Malta, with the aim of providing a platform for discussion and some reference for any future studies”.

Lapira and Zarb argue that a ‘grade-separated’ transport system would work best for Malta. Since most Maltese villages sprawl outwards from the village core, usually from a parish church – and only a few villages are suburbs to larger towns – the urban landscape is of especially narrow streets in the village core, with wider streets appearing towards the outskirts, or the more recently constructed areas. 

This situation practically invites a monorail system given that it would ease traffic congestion – which will only keep getting worse as both general affluence and life expectancy continue to rise.

Zarb and Lapira also point out that “the immigration of expert staff by the successful gaming and financial sector as well as immigration of unskilled labour for work not supplied by the newly affluent Maltese is a recent reality. These all acquire cars once established”.

While admitting that the phenomenon isn’t only limited to Malta, but is a reality for all major cities around the world, Malta is still unique in that it offers very poor alternatives to car travel given that the current bus system remains problematic. “Nearly all cities have better developed coping mechanisms such as: light and heavy rail, bike sharing schemes, road charging, number plate bans, car free zones etc,” writes Neville Zammit for Zarb and Lapira’s website. This situation further bolsters the argument in favour of a monorail service, which would address a persistent problem on Maltese roads: the fact that private cars and public transport are nearly always competing for the same space. 

But whichever variant of the monorail ends up being chosen for Malta would have to ‘share the load’ with other methods of transportation, given that more remote areas away from village cores would not be reachable via a monorail system. However, Zarb and Lapira stress that these ‘transit areas’ should never be too large, since commuters may then be tempted to resort to their private vehicles again.

A monorail system would also be preferable to a ‘light rail’ variant of the kind employed by London’s DLR since, while this may give the rail an ‘exclusive’ lane on the roads, “Malta’s congested dense urban fabric as well as frequent sites of archaeological or natural importance complicate these operations”. Arriva’s brief use of ‘bendy buses’ illustrated these problems clearly, indicating that “introducing light rail on to road infrastructure would probably be problematic”.

Zarb and Lapira also contend that a monorail would be an economically healthy option in reduced usage of private transport, savings in parking, and reduced tailgate emissions. “It becomes increasingly apparent that a system such as the monorail could prove cost-beneficial both to the Maltese economy and the commuters.”