CHUCKY’S SHADE: A Look At What A Maltese Metro Is Exactly Going To Be Like
While many nations may fantasise about flying cars and AI sex robots in the year 2045, Malta is keeping things realistic with the dream of having a functioning metro system by then. Because who needs to take the skies (or have a computer rate you as ‘Just Adequate’) when we can get around the island with actual punctuality?
The first and biggest overhaul we’re going to have to make is the idea that we’re late because of external factors. As a Mediterranean country, we should all be owning up to the fact that we’re never on time because we left our house five minutes before the event started… if we were feeling particularly punctual that day.
Depending on the mood of the people we’re meeting, we might think to blame our tardiness on traffic, or the bus never showing up – but we’ve known our island is essentially one massive game of Frogger for years, so tardiness is a choice.
While we can expect the Maltese Metro to be five minutes late every time (we’re not miracle workers here), the biggest delay won’t be in its functionality, but rather in construction time.
The estimation for the metro’s completion is up to 25 years from now, but we’ve all seen construction on the island, so that number is probably pushing closer to 50. The year is now 2060, I’d like to say we’d be close to retiring at that age, but most likely state pensions won’t kick in before we’re 80. So we trudge off to work – but this time, it’s different.
You descend the newly-tiled escalator (one is probably already loose) into the first-day chaos of the subway. You’ll chuckle to yourself in excitement as the doors ping open for the first time, all the while judging the young kids taking whatever-the-equivalent-of-Boomerangs-is while the carts zoom past. We all judge them, like we didn’t spend at least 15 minutes a day taking photos of our Starbucks cups.
The first thing the new Metro does (apart from score political points for whoever is coincidentally in power at the time with no regard for who planned, implemented or financed it) is force a whole bunch of people who’d never meet to interact. Currently (that is to say, 2019), public transport is only used by those too young or too old to be on our roads, but an efficient metro system that bypasses roads (and God knows what levels of future traffic) all together would see tonnes more people piling into the carriages.
Across from you, an old woman listens to Ariana Grande (who probably isn’t with us anymore), pining for when music meant something; a young hipster-of-the-time counts the beats on a new Cher song (she’s still going strong). He’s happy to tell people all about her, just to let them know he’s into classical music.
They’re seated on either side of a second-generation Maltese person rocking out to Harry Losco’s experimental punk EP.
And nobody bats an eyelid.
You’re heading to Gozo, you’ve got a sign in your hand ready to protest the building of another high-rise – this time it’s on Fungus Rock. They’re calling it the Azure Window, but really it’s just another middle finger on our horizon. As the metro pulls up to the Valletta stop, a few more people with signs pack into the space.
This station already smells vaguely of piss, but to you it’s almost a positive nostalgia that a stop in Valletta smells like a public toilet – it reminds you of a time when the buses were as yellow as the patch you avoided while waiting.
Two minutes pass and you’re in Birkirkara. Three more and you’re outside Mosta. You only get through one more song before the Mellieħa terminus whizzes into focus, and you’re at the last station on Malta. The next leg of your journey is a six-minuter, as the subway crosses over to Gozo, your final destination.
The complete darkness in the tunnel combined with the lack of 12G (that’s the future’s 4G) is the perfect time to think “didn’t we build a tunnel for cars to drive, only to have this perfectly viable speedy option built parallel like nine years later?”
You shrug and add it to the imaginary list of things you’ll ask the island’s first dual Prime Ministers Etoile and Soleil Muscat. It’s quite far down the page; you still need to know why Chiara Siracusa doesn’t have a Ġieħ ir-Republika, when Air Malta’s bezzun will be back (you’re old and hold on to that shit) and why Akila is still airing.
You travel from Ħamrun to Gozo in under 15 minutes, one of the card readers at the exit isn’t working and it’s causing a bottle neck. Eventually, you make it out of the building and bask in the sliver of sunlight that pokes between skyscrapers. Pulling out your iPhone 23 (your grandkids are so embarrassed of your dated technology, but it still works perfectly fine!) you flip through the 75 companies now offering a taxi service in Malta.
Maxims Cabs arrive right away and take you to the protest site in under five minutes. You pay the €90 fare and mutter something about walking being for young people as you step out and realise the camera crews are already packing up. Your entire trip took just shy of half an hour, but you were born in Malta before 2020, so you left your front door ten minutes before it all started, hoping everyone else was also going to be late.
Ahh well, they’ll be building on Filfla next week, so you’ll try make it to that one.