Parking in Pietà

I refer to the letter Parking In Pietà by Joseph P. Azzopardi who criticised my council for introducing residents' parking in Pietà. Mr Azzopardi rightly pointed out that there is an enormous parking problem near St Luke's Hospital.

I would like to emphasise a couple of points on this matter.

Firstly, there is a misconception that the locality of Pietà is the hospital's car park and whoever (the whole of Malta) visits the hospital has an automatic right to park just off its front door - if not within the hospital's grounds.

I disagree with this notion because the locality includes a large number of residents and an ever growing business community. Before the introduction of the new parking scheme, there was absolutely no balance. Hospital staff, patients and visitors to St Luke's Hospital parked in every available parking space for a long number of hours, which meant that no resident or customer of any shop in Pietà had any chance of finding a legal parking space.

Therefore, what the council wanted to achieve in this new scheme is to try to balance out a reality - that the limited parking that exists has to be shared by hospital users, residents and customers of businesses and offices.

Another misconception is that the new scheme was introduced for all the parking spaces in the locality. This is not the case. The council introduced a 30-minute time limit for non-residents in a few pockets in various streets. The greater part of each street has not been affected. We proposed this because we know and understand the realities of the hospital and our intention was merely to give a fighting chance to residents to be able to park in the pockets of these streets. Therefore, hospital users still even today have almost the same quantity of parking spaces as they had prior to the introduction of this scheme. The difference does not exceed 15 per cent of the total number of parking spaces in Pietà and Guardamangia.

Mr Azzopardi also mentioned the hospital car park and criticised the fact that it is kept in semi-darkness. I would like to point out that the car park is closed at night, however, admittedly we could do better on the lighting, hoping that we can introduce it in the not so distant future.

I hope the above satisfies Mr Azzopardi's and the public's queries.