Guerilla commuting for a clogged country

If by some trick of illusion – or by dint of the fact that you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade or so – you haven’t yet noticed that Malta has a traffic problem, you must have cottoned on this fact by now.

It would have been hard not to, what with the government implementing Budget measures to tackle that very problem last week. Apart from the fact that – you know – making your way across the island in any kind of vehicle, public or private, is becoming all but impossible during particular times of day. 

But while there are plenty of pie-in-the-sky solutions that we could conjure up for this pervasive problem – improved roads, costly  introduction of alternative public transportation methods and politically suicidal measures on keeping certain cars off our roads at certain times – these would have to be planned in the long term. And never mind the fact that long term solutions are ‘politically’ bound up in every sense of that loaded word… this also means that we remain stuck with the status quo in the short term. 

But perhaps emboldened by the moral and organisational support offered by the phenomenon of social media, an ever-growing group of individuals is getting together to change the narrative of how we tackle traffic. 

As with all social media initiatives and experiments, it becomes difficult to tell what, exactly, was the flashpoint that led to this big change. But you don’t have to be a rocket scientist – or in this case, some sort of urban planning/transportation expert – to notice that we’ve reached crisis point. 

And crises, like necessity, are the mother of invention.

Enough is enough

One of the key meeting points of this would-be movement was the Facebook group ‘No Traffic 4 Me’. Founded by Ryan Saliba under the slogan ‘If you want change, start doing so yourself!’, it amassed over 1,700 ‘Likes’ ever since it was first set up on 10 October – just over a week ago. 

Though the focus of the Page is ostensibly on cycling – its tagline is ‘Ride to Uni. Ride to Work. Invite 2 friends to do the same! Let’s beat traffic together!’ – it seems to have been a good catalyst to get people thinking about alterative methods of transportation to the car – unfortunately the default method for most of the island’s inhabitants, and the key reason we got into this mess in the first place. 

Apart from going on a literal promotional drive – by strapping a paper with ‘# NO TRAFFIC 4 ME’ to his backpack to drum up awareness – Saliba opened up the space to suggestions of visitors to discuss alternative routes and offer up their own suggestions. That other handy internet invention, Google Maps, helped quantify distances travelled and showed that cycling is hardly an impossible alternative for most. 

But one user took things a step further (again, quite literally). Having only just recently got her driving license, and as exasperated by the traffic situation as anyone else, Suzanne Maas decided to undertake a five-day experiment with her Isla to Gzira work commute. This decision was triggered couple of weeks ago, “that day when the first week of school and a rainy thunderstorm gridlocked the entire country”. Already realising that taking the car wasn’t even an option that day, Maas decided to take the bus. But even that proved to be a non-starter, as 45 minutes into the journey, Maas and her fellow travellers were still stuck at Paola Square. 

“That’s when I decided that it would probably be better to leave the bus and walk to work,” Maas said. 

“Another 45 minutes later, after a walk that took me through Marsa, Hamrun and Msida, I arrived at work in Gzira. I was still the first to arrive, as my colleagues were all stuck in traffic and terribly late; some of them took two and a half hours to get from home to work.”

It was during that fateful walk that Maas began to contemplate the idea of trying out various methods of transport and documenting them online. These included walking, the bus, the car itself and Maas’s self-confessed “favourite”: the combination of the bicycle and ferry. The most striking take-away finding from all this: barring the bus, all of the other options took less time than going by car (yes, that includes walking). 

“I understand sometimes the car can be very convenient, as when  before or after work you need to pick up or drop off someone or something. However, for most people this is not the case every day,” Maas said, adding that another benefit of eschewing the car is that you’re automatically going for the more environmentally friendly option.

Baby steps 

Happily, it is not only one-off individual experiences that are coming out during this traffic crisis. Kevin Farrugia, one half of the Incredible Web start-up, founded Bum-A-Lift (http://www.bum-a-lift.com) – also in an attempt to alleviate the traffic problem. Essentially a more centralized system for carpooling, its social media-enabled interface is yielding positive results, particularly among parents of schoolchildren taking advantage of its ‘Bum a Lift to School’ sub-site. 

According to Farrugia, car-pooling is a simple, commonsense solution to alleviating at least a portion of daily traffic on our roads. 

“A recent study showed that over 24,000 cars travel daily through Tigne. If 10% of those were on Bum a Lift, we would have on average more than one ride per minute. We expect people to realise that they are able to contribute and be the solution that they are looking for,” Farrugia said.