Have the buses won out regarding emissions? After all the hoo-hah involving the Minister, Austin Gatt, and the ADT getting tough with the bus owners to stop their vehicles from spouting foul fumes, nothing has changed.
I bumped into a friend on the Tower Road hill up from the Strand the other day and we had to abruptly stop our conversation and run in different directions to avoid being engulfed in fumes.
In fact, most pedestrians behave like skittles being hit when they see a bus approaching.
We hear about long waiting lists at the hospital and yet one way of curtailing them, at least in cases related to breathing ailments, would be to stop the pollution.
And if new buses were contemplated for the future, it would create much less congestion if their size were compatible with our roads.
Another subject that only gets lip service is child safety on minibuses. Not only do more than half the red minibuses that transport schoolchildren lack seat belts, but they are also not legally (EU regulations) obliged to install them because the vehicles were manufactured before 1997.
Ever since I moved back here in the early 1990s I have been shocked by the blasé attitude to safety, more so with regard to children’s school transport.
I remember thinking “Thank God I lived abroad when my son was at school”. I would have had to drive him to school and back every day, since there was no way I would trust him in the hands of the drivers I had driven behind.
I was not a neurotic mother, but I would have been one if I lived here.
Children were all over the place while the vans where in motion and the driving left a lot to be desired. Besides, children were being dropped off at busy street corners.
It might be impractical to have special stop spaces for school transport vehicles, but at least the drivers should be specially trained before allowing children in their care.
It is not enough to just have a driving licence when one has to drive children, or any vulnerable passengers like the elderly. The same should apply to ambulance drivers.
Especially, since even holding a driving licence is clearly not enough to show one can drive safely here.
Of course any driver who is transporting passengers on any public service should know the rudiments of ensuring their safety. That is obviously not current practice.
According to the Transport Ministry, the ADT (Transport Authority) is carrying out inspections to ensure that the maximum number of passengers allowed is not exceeded and inspectors are also checking the vehicles general condition.
But these spot-checks do not include checking that children are wearing seat belts. The latter apparently is not their responsibility.
What a farce. A safety spot-check that ignores whether children are wearing a seat belt or not.
Why ensure one safety measure is adhered to if a more important one is ignored? And why this fragmentation of responsibility?
The police and local wardens are the people who enforce the wearing of seat belts, while the ADT ensures that school children vans are not overloaded and that the vehicles are in a good condition.
When was the last time you saw a policeman checking that drivers and passengers wore seat belts?
I am going to digress here, but the issue is still safety. I was impressed on Thursday early evening when I saw a senior police officer, on his way out of the Manwel Dimech Street station, getting the driver of a car parked on the pedestrian crossing on the other side of the road to move on.
Unfortunately, as soon as he had gone the illegal parking went on as usual.
It is the pastizzi shop that people stop there for. Does MEPA consider these things when giving permits for change of use?
At least if we encourage people to eat fast food, we should get them to walk and not allow them to park endangering other people’s safety.
There is a rule, which apparently does not exist in this country, that one cannot park within a certain distance of a pedestrian crossing. These are usually marked with zigzags. But here we do not bother to park at a safe distance. We park on the crossing!
As for traffic wardens they cannot even manage to shift their weight when ‘looking after’ cranes.
Back to the school transport vans, why is the ADT stop-checking their general condition? Are these vans not getting their VRT tests? This kind of thing makes one wonder that something is not working, as it should with regard to the VRT tests.
Rules only seem to be rigorously adhered to when it comes to private vehicles. Emissions for example.
As to the school transport vans, apparently most of the white vans are fitted with seat belts. But why not all? It seems ludicrous that parents, who are generally more careful when they have children on board, will be fined if they drive their children without a seat belt, yet school transport van drivers, who can be erratic in their driving are not only not fined, but are also not required to provide seat belts.
I was quite intrigued by the response: “The market can choose which vans it prefers from among those available on the minivan market to provide school transport,” by a Transport Ministry spokesman to The Times on the subject.
If the Transport Ministry and the ADT were serious about child safety they would only license (make available) vehicles with seat belts to transport children.
Parents should also be a lot more proactive on the subject and insist that all school transport vehicles are fitted with seat belts and that drivers are selected.
The Ministry was also quoted as stating, “Malta is fully implementing and enforcing the EU directive relating to the compulsory use of safety belts and child-restraint systems in both passenger-carrying and goods-carrying vehicles”.
So are we concerned about child safety because the EU tells us to be? And anyway the whole statement is a joke because the EU directive relating to the compulsory use of safety belts and child-restraint systems in both passenger-carrying and goods-carrying vehicles is being fully implemented and enforced only on vehicles manufactured after 1997. Most of the red school transport vans seem to have been manufactured before that year.
This issue should not be about directives but common sense. If a vehicle is not deemed safe unless it is fitted with seat belts then it should not be on the road.

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