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EDITORIAL | Wednesday, 12 December 2007

Time to think outside the box

 

There is something uniquely frustrating about our national inability to come to grips with even the most pressing and basic of everyday necessities. Such as, the necessity of going from “A” to “B” in a reasonable time-frame, in relative comfort, without undue stress, and at reasonable expense.
In other words, to reform our public transport service.
Recently, sister paper Illum revealed that there are at present 285,353 licensed vehicles in Malta. Of these, 216,736 are private cars. The numbers sound shocking enough, but anyone who has experienced driving on Malta’s roads at certain times of the day will not need any statistics to conclude that this country has a very serious problem. Traffic has quite simply become a nightmare.
And yet, neither of the two major parties appears to have any long-term strategy to reform the present transport regime. So far, the only discussions on the subject have been limited to the smaller parties, with Alternattiva Demokratika and Azzjoni Nazzjonali separately making a number of interesting proposals.
Although the two parties represent diametrically opposed viewpoints on most issues, their respective ideas on public transport are remarkably similar. Both argue in favour of making better use of the sea, by means of water-taxis and ferries; both have also suggested some form of railway, be it a mono-rail (as favoured by AN’s Anglu Xuereb) or an underground system, as recently suggested by AD’s Harry Vassallo.
Either way, it cannot be a coincidence that public transport remains the unique preserve of Malta’s lesser political entities. Something, somewhere must be hindering the larger parties from embarking on what many will agree is the next major lifestyle change this country so sorely needs.
The likeliest answer is that any reform of the current transport regime involves large amounts of money. Monorails and underground trains would not be possible without enormous investment in infrastructure; as such, it is unlikely that a private entity would be enticed into providing the service without government subsidy.
Besides, as recent confrontations between government with the bus owner’s co-operative have clearly shown, even the replacement of the existing, archaic bus fleet proved too expensive a venture to actually complete. As a result, we are in a curious hybrid stage, where some of our public buses are brand new vehicles imported straight from China, whereas most are still 1940s Bedford vehicles which would not be out of place in a folklore museum.
But where expense may deter governments (and opposition parties) from contemplating large-scale projects such as railway systems, there is little to stop the present authorities from initiating a number of smaller-scale reforms which would go some distance towards alleviating the daily stress of driving in an increasingly impossible motoring environment.
A simple liberalisation of the current taxi regime would be a good start. Under the prevailing system, the number of taxi services operating on the island is automatically curtailed by means of an outrageously prohibitive licence fee, designed to discourage competitors from entering the market. Existing services therefore have little or no impetus to actually compete with each other or improve the general standard of service. As a result Malta must be one of the only countries in the world where it is quite simply impossible to hail a cab in the street. Taxis are available only at specific locations, and even then the fare tends to be far higher than equivalents abroad.
All this could change at the stroke of a pen. And while we are on the subject of taxis, whatever happened to the proposal to introduce taxi meters? Fallen by the wayside, like so many other public transport initiatives: the Barrakka lift, the idea for a cable-car service between Valletta and the Three Cities, and many more.
Surely the time has come to stop allowing a handful of individual to dictate national policy on such a crucial sector. Above all, it is high time that we stop limiting our options to existing models. It would not be amiss for the two larger parties to be humble enough to admit that on this issue alone, the two smaller counterparts have by far the better ideas.
Clearly, the time has come to start thinking outside the box.


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