Every one of us who has ever been behind the wheel after sun-down has likely experienced it. Some of us, especially those of the younger generations, use the twilight hours to let off steam after a day of labour. Some others use them for relaxation. Whether in the chaos of a discotheque, the relative calm of a shore side promenade, in the bustle of a familiar pub or indulging in the fare of a restaurant, many tend to involve a few minutes of driving time and driving time after dark can be a rather risky affair, particularly when one needs to skip town.

When one leaves the relative population density of the population centres, the towns and the villages, we tend to find that the roads become more winding and are poorer served by street lighting. We find ourselves relying more upon the headlamps of our vehicles and the more cautious of ourselves tend to slow down to compensate. However other drivers do similarly and the impact upon one’s visibility can be very similar to or worse than that apparent in the picture. Visibility in meters decreases considerably and one is much less able to make out what lies ahead. To compound the problem, the lack of road lighting means that one has much less of an idea of what or who is lurking or walking along the road. Even worse is the tendency for such roads to lack even rudimentary pedestrian pavements.

Unfortunately we reside within a country that only considers seeking to solve problems when fatalities occur, and such is not guaranteed. Why is it that the areas where tiny shrines to the deceased are set up tend also to have been or remain poorly lit and poorly served by pavements? Why is it that a much larger portion of animals killed during the night also happen to be within areas of poor lighting? I would hazard to guess that hundreds of animals fall victim to Maltese roads every year and I would wager that the density of such fatalities would rank highly amongst EU member states, were they recorded.

Of course the countryside is not the only place that one can find poor lighting. The lighting infrastructure of the Maltese Islands, overall, is ageing, although it seems to be sufficiently maintained thus far overall. However more striking are the gaps that exist in the lighting infrastructure. Within Paceville alone there are several poorly-lit roads just one-to-two blocks away from the entertainment hub. The roads leading down to the promenade are regularly used as makeshift latrines and I would hazard to guess that they are also locations of elevated mugging and rape risk, as crime thrives in the dark.

Street lights may be costly to run, in their current outdated set up, but today (preferably yesterday) is the time to start to phase old energy-guzzling bulbs out in favour of LED-technology. While I am not certain of the suitability of the technology in high velocity, non-urban zones I do believe that they would be ideally suited to lighting up the street level of our urbanized localities, including Paceville.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Local Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.