How many of you are stuck in traffic right now? How many of you spend hours a week fuming behind your steering wheel instead of being productive? Just wasting away your life in gridlock?

And before anyone jumps in with the old cliché of us being the traffic, not everyone can go with the alternatives. If the alternative is a bus, time-table inefficiency and that same traffic throw that option out, and if that alternative is a two-wheeled vehicle, the dangers inherent in egoistic drivers that are arrogant, frustrated and often just reckless, caring very little for the safety of cyclists and motorcyclists, also lessen the uptake of those modes of transport.

Which leaves the car. And the car needs roads.

One more question. How many of you have suddenly come face to face with a road closed by roadworks? Today, I mean. Just today! And then the rigmarole follows of trying to find alternative routes, only to be stymied time and time again by yet more closures due to road works. And on and on till a short trip becomes so convoluted it often defeats its purpose. And those roads not dug up probably have a huge crane blocking them. But that’s a story for another day.

A screenshot showing the extent of roadworks according to Transport Malta’s app.

Roads are being dug up right, left and centre. It is not the first time that I’ve found every route to a destination to be blocked, leaving the poor motorist in the lurch. Coordinated planning seems to be non-existent, with the order of the day being to dig up as many roads as possible at any one given time. And then to just leave them dug up for months without a workman in sight.

Roads are being dug up left, right and centre- Gorg Mallia

I am no architect, nor am I a civil engineer. I’m just a long-suffering citizen who just cannot fathom the reasons behind such actions. I am one of the thousands of Maltese whose roads have been opened at the seams for months, waiting for some rhyme or reason as to why it needs to be so, with no explanation forthcoming and no end in sight. And all the roads in the neighbourhood are in exactly the same condition, reducing precious parking spaces by a huge percentage, adding to the misery of unlucky residents.

Does the right hand of Transport Malta know what the left hand is doing? Or is this all actually planned, so that we all get the impression that things are being done?

A screenshot showing the extent of roadworks according to Transport Malta’s app.

We do know that spin by governments that are incompetent determines that things appearing to be done supersede their actually being done. Could that be why there are so many gaping holes in so many roads all at once? Interminably there, of course, till someone determines it is time for them to be filled up and somewhere else close by dug up. Or is somebody making a killing out of this? I mean, not that such a thing has ever happened in our country, now, has it?

Transport Malta’s own mobile app, when zoomed in, shows where there are roadworks. When zoomed out, however, those roadworks disappear. There are so many of them, they cover the whole island. I have managed to snap a few screenshots of part of the map of Malta and its roadworks before the icons disappeared. The quantity is beyond belief and explains some of the frustrations that drivers face every single day.

And, in the meantime, Honourable Chris Bonett tries to understand why we have traffic jams. It’s because we have too many cars for this tiny rock of course but it’s also because the infrastructure can’t cope and reducing that infrastructure to its bare minimum by digging it away for months on end adds to the crisis.

Is Transport Malta too busy building illegal restaurants to plan anything that makes any sense at all to the poor, beleaguered citizen who just wants to get from A to Z… ideally today?

We need heads that think and planners that plan. We need contractors that are in it for more than the money. And we need people with a vision that think beyond flyovers and flyovers.

We can only take so much of this daily frustration created by incompetence (or maybe something else).

Gorg Mallia

Ġorġ Mallia is a professor of communications and also a cartoonist.