Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1006805
19 LETTERS & EDITORIAL maltatoday | SUNDAY • 22 JULY 2018 Stupidity dressed up as 'bikewash' EINSTEIN once famously said, 'Stu- pidity is doing the same thing time and time again and expecting differ- ent results.' We all know that the shared cycle path on the Mgarr bypass is an utter mess shunned by cyclists because we have used it and found it to be downright uncomfortable being paved rather than tarmacked. It is also inefficient with its con- stant side streets and 33 ramps crossing it, that make it dangerous to use at anything over the legal walking speed of 6KPH. I personally know of two people to come away from it with fractures simply because of the ramps or poor maintenance of the farmers entranc- es that drag dirt and stones onto the path. Even car drivers know this, and don't like it, because they have to cope with cyclists switching to the main carriageway to avoid this mon- umentally poor piece of cycling infra. In fact, if we had to hold up an exam- ple of how not to build our cycling infra, it would be Mgarr. So why are we using this as a blue- print for a number of bi-directional cycle lanes touted in the press as a way forward? Cycling super-highways they are not. Getting onto them is not intui- tive, they are full of ramps and lack cyclist priority, even though they are essentially on the main road. Even pedestrians get this in mod- ern designs in other European cities? These new schemes drawn up by Transport Malta do not improve the cyclists lot one iota. In fact, they just make it far worse and that will backfire on car drivers when a simple tarmacked cycle on each side would serve each better. After all we know Mgarr doesn't work very well for either. These similar schemes are doomed to simply cause conflict with drivers where a simple cycle lane on each side would do. Surely we can design better than the lowest common denominator on the island? Have our engineers learnt noth- ing in the past 10 or 20 years? Have cycling level of service (CLoS) audits on Mgarr, Luqa/HalFar and Cirkew- wa taught them nothing? Clearly this is an exercise in abso- lute transportation stupidity dressed up as bikewash. Jim Wightman St Julian's 'Irresponsible' placards DURING the night of 15/16 July, one of those "pseudo-political groupings" – as Martin Scicluna defines them, hung around 900 illegal placards on tress, lamp-posts and even village- feast decorations and on main thor- oughfares, to continue their monthly stunts in memory of Daphne Carua- na Galizia's killing. They completely ignored the great hazard they were creating to drivers due to the distrac- tion they created. How utterly stupid these politically desperate people are, that they can't even see that what they had done could easily have resulted in another "killing" albeit unwillingly but still very irresponsibly. Eddy Privitera Mosta Mikiel Galea Letters & Clarifications