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The government and the Transport Authority are re-evaluating the way the people of Gozo and Malta, and the many visitors, move from one place to another, Transport Minister Austin Gatt announced this morning.

In his speech Dr Gatt said, “Our efforts in this regard are part of the wider strategy for Malta’s transport landscape which we are currently re-defining. We are using the present months to take a fresh look at the way the people of Malta and their many visitors move from one place to another.

The objectives are necessarily quite simple. Transport must be efficient and reliable exploiting the concentration of trips and distributing the pressure on the network to even it out as much as possible. Transport must be inclusive giving the opportunity for those with mobility disadvantages to live a full life without barriers and dangers. Transport must be a contributor, not a burden, to our quality of life: the quality of the air we breathe cannot be the price for the quality of our trip to work and back.

The objectives are simple. The solutions necessarily are anything but. Malta is a fantastically car-dependant country and I doubt very much whether this is a cultural choice as many seem to simplistically assume. The rates of our motorisation and the lengths of our roads as a ratio of the national territory are up there with the classic car-loving countries out of our region.

I do believe that this is at least partly due to the fact that we have for too long assumed that a country of our size cannot viably sustain alternative means of transport. I think it is high time this matter is looked into. The public and group transport scene has continued to operate on a structure designed around a time when car ownership was at half of today’s rates. It is hardly rocket science to work out that as people travel more often, for longer and between an ever growing list of points of origin and destination, the entire transport network - private and public - must adapt with it.

We must work on securing a shift from transport using private transport towards group transport: buses of various sizes on route or chartered basis, taxis larger and smaller, bicycles, boats and the sharing of cars.

This does not make the car an object of derision. A greater modal shift will make car trips faster and less polluting. It will make the experience of the motorist who will still need to use the car for those trips for which this is the more efficient means of transport, a safer, faster, cheaper one.

It is why in parallel with this we will continue to upgrade out road infrastructure. My ambitions in this regard are not small. Malta’s road network must catch up the aspirations of the Maltese: a European-class road network that is safe, reliable and of the highest quality. In the last few years we have made substantial progress but, excuse the mix of metaphors, the road is long. We are working on innovative solutions to get there.”