€7 million to be spent on minor reconfiguration of Cirkewwa road

The government is spending €7 million on two kilometres of road reconfiguration between Marfa and Cirkewwa despite the nature of the works being so minor that a planning permit is not required.

Announced as his first initiative since taking over the Transport Ministry, Minister Chris Bonett said the sum would be spent on creating a new lane leading to the Gozo Ferry terminal in Cirkewwa.

This reverses the scope of the original road’s single-lane configuration, which was designed and built in 2012 with European Union funds as a deliberate traffic-calming measure.

The work will remove central strip barriers to divide the road into three carriageways instead of the current two. No additional land will be taken up, no extensions to the existing road will be constructed, and no new tarmac will be laid.

As such, it is unclear why the project would cost €7 million.

While the new minister said the reconfiguration would create two carriageways for motorists heading towards the Gozo ferry, road safety experts said this was “madness”.

“In 2012, when the road was rebuilt, it was designed so that cars would not be able to speed up to reach a departing ferry. That is why it was a single lane. Now the new minister wants to reverse the situation by creating a major accident-prone road due to possible speeding,” an expert told The Shift.

Before the 2012 works, a number of accidents had taken place on the road, including several fatal ones.

The Shift is informed that Infrastructure Malta has tasked two road contractors with working on the road reconfiguration: V&C contractors owned by Vince Borg, better known as ‘Ċensu n-Nizz’, and Excel Systems, co-owned by a group of Turkish and Maltese businessmen.

The Shift asked Ivan Falzon, the CEO of Infrastructure Malta, if the contract was awarded by direct order and whether any safety study had been carried out on the proposed changes. He did not reply.

Road construction projects in Malta are notorious for being delayed and significantly over budget, and they usually involve the same group of contractors.

Neither the government nor the National Audit Office (NAO) has ever conducted a cost-benefit analysis on the value of the money involving the money being spent on roads.