Drop the car keys

With the European Mobility Week and Car Free Day just around the corner, it is high time for us as a nation to address our need for a real transport strategy. Far too many strategy documents and master plans have been left on the shelf as dusty documents.

It is a good opportunity to reflect on how those 12km of extra cars, built up during the school holidays, will impact our trip to work. While alternatives hit a dizzying high of 28% in 2018, rising a massive 3% in right years, they had plummeted to just 15% by the NSO’s travel survey in 2021. Such figures should be great cause for concern.

While a metro seems like a panacea, it is really a placebo. It cannot be implemented within the next 20 years or so. We need to stop dreaming.

We need to look at making our towns and villages places where people want to walk, cycle or scoot. Photo: OleksSH/Shutterstock.com

It is time for the government’s promise of brave and courageous decisions. Our towns and villages, formerly criss-crossed by roads that made them accessible, are now a maze of no entries designed to double-parking, encouraging more people to drive, while our cycle lanes are in the middle of nowhere. White elephants only the brave will cycle too. That is if you can get too them. Even designated cycle routes like Triq Ħwawar, Is-Slielem, the start of the Mosta-university cycle corridor or links to cycle lanes like Triq Martin Luther King have been blocked as no entries.

Although the EU wants 2024 to be the European Year of Cycling and double cycling in 2024, the local trend to make cyclists travel further – on average they commute 0.5km further than drivers and it seems to be due to these kind of diversions – shows this is not what they had in mind.

Even more worrying is that larger roads in towns are making pedestrian trips longer and riskier, with more crossings, too. This will only discourage walking and encourage driving, raising the 96% of single occupancy car use even further.

We urgently need to look at making our towns and villages places where people want to walk, cycle or scoot and make them less likely to reach for the car keys. This is not something new. It is something that has been ignored in favour of votes.

Politicians need to stop playing chicken and bite the bullet if we want to avoid total gridlock in the next six months. Joseph Muscat once said we must not punish drivers. It is time to stop punishing those who walk (and, therefore, bus), cycle or scoot.

Jim Wightman – St Julian’s