Car Torque - This business of our roads

The two roads I highlighted last month are being attended to: St Paul's Bypass may well get its missing second lane now that the relevant contractor appears to have men and machines 'hard' at work, and the almost unusable stretch of the Rabat/Siġġiewi/Għar Lapsi road has been dug and patched.

I presume that this is the prelude to putting a 'wearing' coat over the whole length of road.

If I am wrong, rest assured the matter will be highlighted once more. I sincerely hate having to rumble on about the raging bad habits inherent in the traffic management side of the Malta Transport Authority (ADT), but over two years after I penned a memo to the then chief executive stating that anything up to a 30 per cent attrition rate could be expected annually for 'cat's eyes' on certain roads, nothing has been done to tidy up the missing reflectors on the Naxxar/Salina road. From inception, there were far too many reflectors placed down the centre of the road, but it is dangerous in the extreme to allow any missing centre reflectors on the many corners encountered on this road.

The reason being that the road is busy at night, sometimes very busy, and there is an almost total lack of street lighting.

All motorists will have noted that many roundabouts are now without directional arrows.

This is only relatively safe if all road users are entirely familiar with driving on the left.

As soon as continental visitors get behind the wheel, if only conversant with driving on the right, directional arrows are an absolute must, as these poor innocents may well drive round the roundabout the wrong way in the confusion of the moment.

Following my current fad for providing photographic evidence of odd quirks in our road workers' skills, here is a shot of a rather strange area of centre markings in Triq Bezzina in the San Ġwann urban/suburban sprawl.

Had the council put in the required request for road markings to the ever-friendly ADT and then acted so irresponsibly, without a doubt at some point a field officer would have picked up on the glaring faults.

This corner should have a continuous line round it, except for the entry/exit at the junction with Triq Azzopardi, and not a broken line.

In any case, the lines and gaps and somewhat erratically paint-ed artworks are entirely nonsensical, as every professional contractor in the art of painting carriageway markings would have known well.

Ten years ago, the then San Ġwann mayor and council secretary asked for, and received, an enormous amount of help with 'One Way' systems and all the necessary street furniture, including road humps - properly constructed ones, not the synthetic horrors that I can only hope have not been sanctioned by Traffic Management.

They are only moderately soft on a car if the car goes over them at 50km/h or more, and unless the speed limits are brought to a ludicrously low maximum.

These modern horrors should, to help the thousands who own old or valuable cars, never be used.

The same can be said for all bus drivers, including the unscheduled coach and mini-bus owners, taxi drivers, fleet owners, and most importantly of all, ambulance drivers.

Until the arrival of the ADT, the Traffic Control Board had a policy on road humps, and fought long and hard, once they were approved in certain sensitive areas only, to try to make councils construct them in accordance with the guidelines, which stated that they would be no higher than 10cms on normal roads, and 5cms on bus routes and trauma routes, and they should be 3.7 metres wide.

A reminder or deterrent, not an axle or spring 'breaker'. I suggest the minister looks into the whole issue of traffic calmers, for road humps are only the tip of the traffic management experts' portfolio. They are, however, the easy and cheap option, and on many occasions the worst possible one. With the incredible qualifications held by technicians within the ADT, it seems very odd to me that the cheap, unsuitable option is so often taken by these young bloods.

After all, we are eternally being regaled with stories of EU funding for almost anything under the sun.

So surely if we are so strapped for cash that we simply cannot take our roads system seriously, the old cap in hand approach may possibly work as well now as it did 30 years ago.

The June 7 holiday saw numerous members from the Old Motors Club, including the last chairman of the ADT, members from the Old Motorcycles Club and the Military Vehicles Club take part in a day-long regularity run.

It was a grand day, except for the state of the roads round Rabat and Dingli cliffs.

The consensus was that councils and the ADT should surely come into the real motoring world.