€8 million investment in 202 new roads by June 2012

Gatt was speaking at an onsite visit at a road construction site in Tarxien, where he said that, following liaisons with Local Councils, 202 new residential roads where identified upon which a 15-month-long work programme costing €7.85 million would start.

The road works, spread over 421 localities, represent an investment of €8 million into Malta’s road network, Gatt said. “The biggest challenge is working with the 29 contractors involved, and making sure that they respect the deadline we’ve set down for ourselves,” Gatt said.

He added that Transport Malta would be conducting quality testing and sampling both during the works, and after when completed. “Those contractors that do not measure up to the quality standards will be required to re-do the works at own cost,” he also said.

A Transport Malta spokesperson elaborated by saying that during the works, quality testing would include compaction checks, random asphalt sampling, temperature testing, and mixed design testing.

 Gatt added that there were further roads that had not yet reached the 70% building requirement which were in the pipeline for proper road surfacing.

He explained that the reason this 70% benchmark was established because roads there were not sufficiently built up could change in shape and size dramatically, rendering road surfacing cost-ineffective.