No amount of road widening can ever keep up with vehicle increase rate, prominent economist says

Prominent economist Marie Briguglio has, after analysing statistics for the number of vehicles registered in Malta and their rates of increase over the past three years, said that no amount of road widening can ever keep up with the current vehicle increase rate.

Analysing figures published by the National Statistics Office, Briguglio found that between the first quarter of 2016 and the first quarter of 2019, there had been an increase of eight per cent in private vehicles.

“There are 388,000 vehicles on the road across Malta’s 312 square kilometres, of which most are private cars (75%). We managed to ramp up the numbers (net stock) by 38,389 new vehicles over three years: if you were to line them up, you would need 172,000 metres minimum. No amount of road widening could ever cope,” she said.

Her analysis found that there has been an increase in every kind of vehicle that can possibly be imagined save for white taxis – where there was a marginal decrease of one per cent.

The category which saw the most significant increase is the leased motorcycle or ebike category, where there was a 112 per cent rise. Other notable increases were in garage hire cars (104%), leased quad or ATVs (71%), and leased passenger cars (39%).

The NSO statistics note that

there has been an eight per cent increase so that the number of private vehicles now registered is 289,399 – 22,192 more than registered three years ago.

Briguglio also calculated that there has been an 11 per cent increase in agricultural vehicles, a 13 per cent increase in coaches and private buses, a 17 per cent increase in minibuses, a 38 per cent increase in privately-owned motorcycles, an 11 per cent increase in goods-carrying vehicles, and a 13 per cent increase in special purpose vehicles – these being defined by the NSO as road motor vehicles which have purposes other than the carriage of passengers or goods, such as fire engines, mobile cranes, mobile kiosks, towing vehicles and selfpropelled rollers among others.

The NSO itself states that out of the 387,775 vehicles registered as of the first quarter of 2019, 77.8 per cent were passenger cars, 13.6 per cent were commercial vehicles, 7.5 per cent were motorcycles/quadricycles and All Terrain Vehicles (ATVs), while buses and minibuses amounted to less than one per cent.

Using the same NSO figures for the last three years, a simple calculation finds that the rate of increase in licensed vehicles of all types equates to 32 vehicles a day.

The economist’s analysis notes that if all of the vehicles registered between 2016 and the first quarter of 2019 had to be laid out one after the other, one would need at least 172,000 metres. That is almost as long as the distance between Malta and the city of Catania in Sicily, which is 188 kilometres.

Briguglio’s input is the latest in a series of expert voices airing their opinion on the government’s infrastructural improvement projects – the latest of which, the Central Link project, has attracted an ever-increasing amount of ire for the environmental damage that it will cause.

Brigulgio also wrote the book ‘No Man’s Land – People, Place & Pollution’ in which she provides commentary to three decades’ worth of environmental cartoons by popular artists Steve Bonello.

“Boasting one of the highest rates of cars per person in Europe, Malta has shown little sign of addressing, still less reversing the trend,” she wrote in the book.

“The present infrastructure is heavily geared towards private vehicles, with little to disincentivise their use. As an unsurprising result, there are now cars practically everywhere you look: any road, any street, indeed any accessible public space is fair game for driving and parking a car,” she continues.

The Central Link project – which has been so negatively greeted that over a thousand people were moved to protest against it last Sunday – is just one of a number of roadwidening exercises that the government is undertaking through the agency Infrastructure Malta.

Recently completed was the widening of Tal-Balal Road between San Ġwann and Naxxar, while the Marsa Junction Project, featuring a number of flyovers, is also currently underway, as is the project to widen Buqana Road. Other projects slated for development include a set of flyovers in Msida, among others.

Many have protested that the direction that is being taken by the government in infrastructural improvement is nothing more than a short-term solution, and does not do nearly enough to incentivise a shift from Malta’s reliance on private cars.

Figures recently published by Eurostat note that Malta has 613 cars registered per 1,000 inhabitants – the fourth highest in Europe behind Finland, Italy, and Luxembourg.