The recent call for safer roads for vulnerable road users prompted the transport minister to promise a €35 million investment into a national cycle route network.
A positive step, and a much-needed one, vital to support Environment Minister Miriam Dalli’s aims towards more sustainable active transport. Especially following the exit stage right of NextBike.
Meanwhile, commuting cyclists are rightfully sceptical. You see, in reality the promised 60 to 90 kilometres of cycle lanes will just cover two to three per cent of the total road network. What happens on the other 97 per cent? After all cyclists don’t want to see another Kappara.
Few people know that the Bicycle Advocacy Group had asked for cycle lanes on Kappara years before it was built. Someone high up had issued a firm no, despite pointing out that cyclists used the (old) road, with its quite wide hard shoulders, safely for years.
An obvious progression from the Coast Road, eventually cyclists asked for a safer route through Gżira to Msida.
This too was turned down, but a single sided lane was proposed and facilitated wider and faster slip lanes (yes right next to the Enemalta sub-station), using dubious standards, despite cyclists pointing out the obvious dangers and limitations of the scheme. To this day, Kappara is still not connected to anywhere. Accessing it is unsafe and infamously took the life of Zoran Pavlovic. An avoidable death, where cycle lanes should have been built but weren’t upon the word from on high.
Even if you double the money for cycle lanes to €70 million, without a plan of how to build them, where to build them and why to build them it still won’t work and may end up just as dangerous for the end user.
Remember we still don’t have a working cycling policy, cycling strategy, or infrastructural guidelines. Anyone remember ‘Cycle Malta’? It is also difficult to see how Transport Malta can define where safer infrastructure needs to be built if it cannot tell you where cyclists need to go to or come from?
Nor can it tell you where safety needs to be improved if its own website only shows the triannual ranking of high accident concentration sections and network safety ranking as required under LN291 of 2018 (EU directive 2008/96/EC) from 2016 to 2018.
Aaron Farrugia’s promise is welcome and Dalli can tap into it if done well. But the basic building blocks are just not there.
Jim Wightman – St Julian’s