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PN Councillor Presents Radical Proposals To Tackle Malta’s Traffic Nightmare

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As Malta’s traffic problem has continued to aggravate with the dawn of the new scholastic year, Nationalist Msida councillor Alan Abela-Wedge has called for some drastic measuresto ease the gridlock. 

These include tying license fees to mileage, spacing out school opening hours, and banning trucks from the roads during rush hours.

“Yesterday evening I had a conversation with a parent who told me how her daughter is waking up at 5am in order to leave home by 5.30am in order to get to school,” Abela-Wadge wrote in a blogpost. “After that she will arrive home around 4.30pm and after a quick meal she will have around 90 minutes of homework. All that and we’re still only in the second week of school.”

Truck

Alan Abela-Wadge proposed banning trucks from Malta’s roads during rush hours

Amongst the most controversial of his proposals is one to ban large vehicles, buses excluded, from the streets before 9am and after 4pm, a similar move as Transport Malta recently announced for learner vehicles.

“This is very controversial because we all know the importance of the construction industry in Malta, but if we’re not drastic, we will not see improvement,” he said. “Obviously this might have a drastic effect on the construction industry, so before it is even considered all the stakeholders involved needs to be consulted.

Bike

Alan Abela-Wadge said people should be incentivised to shift from cars to motorcycles

Abela-Wadge also proposed spacing out school opening hours between 7am and 9:30am so as to spread out school traffic between 6:30am and 9am. Another novel proposal involves tying license fees to annual mileage, with fewer miles being rewarded with cheaper license fees as an incentive for people not to use the car wherever they go.

The councillor also called for a drastic incentive to get car drivers to shift to motorcycles – namely that motorcyclists who give up their car driving licenses should be rewarded with a full tax refund upon purchase of the vehicle, as well as have their motorcycle license fee completely waived and their insurance slashed by half for the first ten years.

“If this measure is successful we will see a reduction in people driving cars because in order to benefit from this, they would have to give up their car license,” he said.

Trag

Alan Abela-Wadge wants to see a Venice-style traghetto system in Malta

Other proposals include having all waste collection take place during the night, introducing a Venice-style traghetto sea transport model, incentivising private companies to offer transport to their staff, upgrading pavements to cater for cyclists, and commencing work on an underground train system. 

“There are already more cars than people in Malta, and 35 new cars are being registered everyday,” Abela-Wadge said. “By making roads wider, adding more lanes and making roundabouts smaller, all we’re doing is postponing the inevitable. It might work for today, but with 65,000 new cars on the streets in the next five years, we’re going to be back to square one. We need more permanent measures and sometimes to see a drastic change, we have to implement drastic measures.”

Which of these anti-traffic proposals do you agree with? Let us know in the comments’ section 

READ NEXT: Maltese Commuters Take A Break From Complaining To Give Traffic Solutions

Tim is interested in the rapid evolution of human society and is passionate about justice, human rights and cutting-edge political debates. You can follow him on Instagram or Twitter/X at @timdiacono or reach out to him at [email protected]

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