How short-sighted can we be?

At the end of last year, the number of licensed vehicles in Malta had practically reached 400,000, data published by the National Statistics Office on Friday shows.The number of licensed vehicles had increased by over 12,000 over the same period in 2018.

Another NSO publication showed that, in 2018, an average of 73 vehicles were licensed every day, and the actual number of vehicles on the road increased by an average of 36 a day. The numbers are staggering, and they keep growing year on year.

Just take a look at the data for the past few years:

In the last quarter of 2015, the stock of licensed vehicles stood at 346,918. A year later it was 358,947. In Q4 of 2017, the number stood at 372,000, and a year after that it had climbed to 385,326.

The data shows that the number of licensed vehicles increased by 50,600 over a four-year period – from 2015 to 2019. That means an average increase of 12,650 vehicles per year.

If this trend persists, we will have 450,000 licensed vehicles by 2023, and 500,000 by 2027.

The previous administration had said that it would not start working on a mass transit system until after the €700 million/seven-year road rebuilding programme is complete. It is clear that, by the time we start working on such a project, and more so by the time the mammoth project is completed, it will be too late.

Is it possible that our politicians are not seeing this reality? Is it possible that the only immediate solution is to keep widening our roads and building flyovers (at the cost of large areas of agricultural land), especially when we already know that some of these projects will already be obsolete by the time they are completed?

How can it be that the solution is always to make bigger and wider roads, and never to try and decrease the number of cars on our roads? There are so many options out there, but we are opting for none of them. Carsharing and carpooling have not really had an effect, bicycle lanes are still pretty much a thing of fantasy and another possible solution – the introduction of e-scooters – was botched and made unattractive.

We are often told that public transport usage is on the rise, but, at the same time, the number of cars on our roads has increased at a consistent level year after year. It is clear that something is wrong with our transport strategy and the widening of roads on its own is not a solution – it is just a temporary fix.

People in the private sector have drafted detailed studies and plans for a metro system that would be economically feasible. Yet the government somehow feels that an unnecessary undersea tunnel between Malta and Gozo is a more pressing issue, and that turning Malta the country into one big highway will solve all our traffic problems.

The previous administration was adamant that the metro project will have to wait. Maybe this was to keep contractors happy and their pockets lined for a few more years? Who knows?

We truly hope that this new administration sees things differently and gets its priorities straight, before the entire country becomes one big traffic jam and vehicle emissions become an even worse health hazard.