Doctors for Road Safety has been active in this field since 2017. As leaders in the medical profession, we have seen too many needless fatalities, too many lives extinguished before their time and rampant waste of talent, not to mention the financial impact of lost man hours.
The health bill of the associated morbidity of crash victims is huge for our small country.
Since the beginning, we focused on education and advocacy, firmly believing that things could only change for the better.
We were encouraged, then, by having a well-crafted road safety strategy launched in 2014, which had established the Road Safety Council, with targets that included a 50 per cent reduction in road fatalities and 30 per cent reduction in grievous injuries over a 10-year period ending 2024.
Empowered by this road safety strategy, we organised courses and events, educational campaigns for schools and the public and held various advocacy meetings with top officials.
We set up a very well-attended national conference on road safety under the patronage of then president George Vella. The minister for transport closed the conference and soon after pledged the establishment of a transport safety investigative commission and renewed the government’s commitment to Vision Zero.
Fast forward to 2025 and let’s see what has changed from 2014. Fatalities have remained practically the same in absolute numbers. 2022, in particular, was the worst year ever when we had 28 road fatalities as compared to the average 15 road deaths per annum.
The number of grievous injuries that leave a range of disabilities have also remained the same number at around 300 annual cases. The transport safety investigative commission has not been established yet, missing the deadline by at least one year.
It is not known whether any of the other detailed KPIs of the road safety strategy were achieved but the main targets were certainly not. The due update of the strategy is still not published despite numerous promises made in the media. In fairness, new infrastructure has improved the road network with better safety features, even though space and safety for alternative mobility for cyclists, one of the most vulnerable groups, took second priority.
Enforcement remains a shared responsibility between the Police Force, Transport Malta and LESA, shared by two ministries. This must require considerable coordination and cooperation to achieve the desired results from visible and consistent enforcement. The European Road Safety Observatory report for 2023 highlights that “enforcement in Malta is less widely perceived as effective in comparison to other EU countries”.
There is still a gap in drink-driving enforcement- Ray Gatt
There is still a gap in drink-driving enforcement, and drug-driving enforcement has not even started, despite the legal use of marijuana. Use of technology to help with enforcement is restricted to fixed point speed cameras, which have become blasé.
There is little evidence of the commitment to Vision Zero. It is certainly not reflected in any consistent set of data produced in the public sphere, which any serious setup should be able to produce to monitor progress. A quick look at media articles dating back to 20 years ago gives you the impression that those articles were written yesterday.
Meanwhile, the consequences of all this are costing the country some €300 million annually, to say nothing about the unmeasurable loss to stranded and disrupted families, endless agony and despair.
Malta needs a paradigm shift in the management of road safety. The necessary interventions are too many to list here but they should be coordinated by one single entity, uniting the current fragmented services which are still under multiple agencies and ministries. Just as in other EU countries, all issues relating to road safety should be managed by one authority with the necessary autonomy to achieve the desired goals.
Until this next quantum leap in quality, we may still be writing this same article in 20 years’ time and another 300 loved ones lost.
Ray Gatt is president of Doctors for Road Safety.