Is this the end of Malta’s free parking culture?

Malta’s chief officer for climate change has proposed parking should come at a price to drive down car dependency on the island.

“We’ve increased our dependency on cars,” warned Maria Attard, director at Institute for Climate Change and Sustainable Development on TVM programme Popolin yesterday.

“We assume the space outside our homes is free and available to us whenever we want. But it’s common space and should be shared by everyone – with cars and without,” she said.

Attard explained that Malta is suffering from a “lack of vision” when it comes to moving away from car culture, and pushing for fees could push people to use alternative transport.

“Parking has never been a priority issue. In other countries, it’s the main part of development plans, management of towns and construction. There needs to be a balance between free parking and parking with a fee,” the director added.

“Space is a resource, it has a price.”

Garage abuse is also another issue, according to Attard, because some citizens use the space for playrooms or living rooms instead of a car space and opt to park outside instead.

To clamp down on the growing issue in Malta, Attard called for more enforcement, discipline and respect, more studies on how to ditch private cars and more ambitious management plans.

There are more than 400,000 licensed vehicles on Malta’s roads, according to fresh data from the National Statistics Office. That’s nearly one car for every person on the island.

Around 56 new vehicles were added every day in the last quarter of 2020.

Talks of a mass transport system to solve Malta’s congestion problems has been mounting in recent years. Many back a metro system and Transport Minister Ian Borg confirmed that state studies concluding this month. However, questions over the project’s feasibility still remain.

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