Parking in Pietà

Mr Joseph P. Azzopardi (The Sunday Times, February 27) criticised the 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. First, there is a misconception that the Pietà locality is the hospital's car park, and that whoever visits St Luke's, i.e. the entire population of Malta, has an automatic right to park in its vicinity.

I disagree with this notion, because the locality includes a large number of residents and a growing business community.

Before the introduction of the new parking scheme, there was absolutely no balance. Hospital staff, patients and visitors of St Luke's 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 was to try to balance out a reality, i.e. 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 half-hour time limit for non-residents in a few pockets in various streets. The greater part of the streets have not been affected.

We proposed this because we know and understand the realities of the hospital and our intention was merely to a give a fighting chance to residents to be able to park in the pockets of these streets.

Therefore, hospital users today still have almost the same amount of parking spaces as they had before the introduction of this scheme. The amount of parking spaces within the scheme does not exceed 15 per cent of the total parking spaces available in Pietà and Guardamangia.

Mr Azzopardi also criticised the hospital car park because 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 and I hope that we can introduce better lighting in the not too distant future.

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