A road safety strategy launched a decade ago has failed to hit several of its targets, according to an analysis carried out by Times of Malta, as two road deaths in the early weeks of 2025 thrust road safety concerns back into the spotlight.

On Monday 6 January, 25-year-old Alejandro Brincat was killed after he lost control of his car in Attard.  

On the same day, a 24-year-old Nepalese woman, Gauri Kumari Baral, was hit by a pickup truck in Fgura. She died just a few days later.

A decade after a landmark road safety strategy pledged to cut road fatalities by half, Times of Malta examines whether the strategy was a success.

What did the strategy promise?

Published in 2014, the road safety strategy set an ambitious target of reducing road fatalities by 50%, grievous traffic-related injuries by 30%, and slight injuries by a fifth.

Authorities at the time argued that while Maltese roads were already safe compared to most other European countries, things could and should get better, with Malta still struggling to tackle issues like speeding and drunk driving.

The strategy promised to improve road safety through a series of “strategic actions” aimed at addressing shortcomings in everything from enforcement to road engineering and education.

Then transport minister Joe Mizzi launching the strategy in 2014. File photo: Matthew Mirabelli

Have these strategic actions been implemented?

Some have although, in reality, many of the actions are fairly vague in nature (one reads: “strive to increase awareness on the causes and implications of driver fatigue”), making it tricky to assess their progress.

Others still are even more complex to measure.

One pledge promises to implement a speed management policy drafted two years prior, in 2012. A glance at this policy suggests that while some of its recommendations have been adopted (to extend a penalty point system to all drivers, for instance), others have remained on the shelf.

And while, true to the strategy’s word, the Malta Road Safety Council was set up in 2015, there have been questions over its effectiveness, with the council reportedly going months on end without meeting last year.

Are Malta’s roads getting safer?

Certainly not if we go by the targets that the policy had set itself.

There were 10 traffic fatalities in 2014, the year in which the policy was published, and 18 the year before. By 2020, when authorities hoped traffic deaths would be slashed in half, there were 12 deaths on the road.

Official data places the number of road deaths last year at 9 until September, with data for the last quarter of the year – in which a bus driver, a biker and a pedestrian all died in separate road accidents - yet to be published.

More broadly, the number of people killed on Malta’s roads has fluctuated from one year to the next, going from a low of 9 in 2021 to a record high of 28 the following year.

But the number of traffic fatalities alone is not the best measure of Malta’s road safety, simply because the relatively small numbers mean that figures tend to vary wildly from one year to the next, making it difficult to establish a trend.

What about injuries?

The numbers for serious injuries also do not make for encouraging reading.

Just under 300 people were seriously injured in a traffic accident back in 2014, according to Malta’s traffic statistics.

This has gradually risen each subsequent year (except for 2020, when Covid kept people indoors for much of the year), reaching a high of 433 in 2023.

This means that rather than dropping by 40%, as the strategy anticipated, serious injuries are now almost 50% higher than they were a decade ago.

On the other hand, the number of slight injuries on the road does seem to be on the wane.

While almost 1,500 people reported a slight injury after a traffic incident a decade ago, this is now down to a little over 1,100, a 23% drop, in line with the strategy's plans.

More cars and more accidents

With the sheer number of cars on Malta’s roads ballooning by the day (33 new cars each day, at last count), it’s no surprise to see that the total number of accidents is on the rise.

There were some 16,500 traffic accidents reported in 2023, more than at any point over the previous two decades.

But while there are far more cars on Malta’s roads today, the accident rate is a little lower than it once was. Back in 2014, there were 43 accidents for every 1,000 cars on the road. Today this is down to roughly 37.

And fewer of these accidents result in injury these days,

Of these 16,500 accidents in 2023, just one in ten resulted in an injury, fewer than in most previous years.

The figures for the first nine months of 2024 are even lower, dropping to 9%. The last time the figure was this low was back in 2011, hovering around 12% for much of the past decade.

Questions sent to the transport ministry and Transport Malta remain unanswered at the time of publication