Traffic accidents have provided us with a tragic spectacle in the last several weeks drawing our attention to the mortal dangers of using our roads. Can we put it all down to poor driving? What else contributes to making our shortest excursion a dance with death? By Harry Vassallo
Malta is one of the most road infested countries in the world. Towns and villages have grown towards one another eating up the countryside and requiring new connections across what remains of it. Heavily dependent on private transport, we demand new roads and bypasses to alleviate our frustration as we edge towards gridlock.
Even as we go past the 400,000 mark in population the cost per capita of our roads remains far above the global average. Every metre of tarmac costs each Maltese citizen more than it would cost any other European simply because there are far fewer of us in relation to the expanse of paved road that surrounds us.
Although a backbone of decent roadway has been constructed thanks to European Union and Italian Protocol funds, the rest of our roads are a legacy of no-design roadbuilding and constitute an enormous economic and safety burden.
Kilometres upon kilometres of road have been built without proper foundations, without adequate specification of the surfacing material, without surface drainage, without any care to camber, banking or the avoidance of dangerous curves. Intersections have developed organically, a goat path becoming a track, then a road and finally a junction of arterial roads.
While we cling to the car in a collective effort to retain developed nation status we have cut corners by not dedicating the space necessary to make our roads safe. Access and exit ramps to arterial roads where they do exist are short, steep and bent making transition to and from these roads a heart-stopping experience. We simply do not have the space it takes.
Where no ramps are available we have turn offs from the fast lane or roundabouts leading traffic about to get off the road to hog the fast lane. No wonder overtaking in the slow lane is standard practice on every road.
Because we have so much road surface and of such poor quality, maintenance is an overwhelming task. Here comes the rainy season again. The first drizzle will smear the summer’s dust and grime into a lethal slime combined with drips of oil and diesel which have waited all summer long to float up from the smallest crevices to ambush us. Every year we tend to forget, or at least enough of us to make driving an extreme sport for everybody else.
When it begins to rain in earnest we have sandbanks and gravel pits collecting on the bends and as it continues through the autumn the undrained parts of the road begin to disintegrate creating a multitude of potholes. They usually hang around so long that we have the opportunity to set them to memory. If we are smart, we also memorise the ones on the opposite lane to avoid the traffic that may veer to avoid the potholes.
In our road jungle we become monkeys. Whereas elsewhere we can navigate in the expectation that everything ahead of us will be within manageable parameters or marked off by adequate warnings in good time, here we take our lives in our hands every time we set off. We are on our own and have to deal with constant surprises as best we can.
So must everybody else on the road which means that we have to deal with the endless possibilities of other drivers’ reactions to these surprises. With this background, a general culture of shameless opportunism and a total absence of courtesy are almost inevitable. Our roads do not give us a sense of over-riding order serving our needs and making us as safe as can be. Traffic calming measures and speed cameras have reduced the number of fatal accidents significantly but we experience them as a violation. Has anybody calculated the pollution/disease/death contribution of 100,000 vehicles that never get to top gear?
Bringing us all to an ant’s pace is not a solution. Eliminating traffic would eliminate road accidents altogether but who even contemplates that? Ironically it becomes an admission of defeat: because it appears to be impossible to provide safe, fast roads, we have been provided with excruciatingly slow main roads. Although the speed limit is 80 kph there are only a few hundred metres of road where it is possible to reach it legally and even then the chances of finding the road clear of buses, heavy vehicles or the inveterate slowcoach are almost nil.
None of this reduces our frustration as we sit in our expensive over-engineered darlings made for whizzing along on motorways and autobahns. The heat, the unbearably slow traffic and the unused potential of our personal rockets meld into an explosive cocktail tempting us to detonate a few seconds of unwisdom that can be fatal for us and for others. It happens.
There may be a 101 other contributors to the dangers on our roads from drunk drivers to overloaded lorries but we can only hope to get road users to be serious after the roads and the authorities who build and run them take themselves seriously.
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