Safer on the road than on the pavement

I am disabled. I will say it plainly. It is safer for me to walk on the road than on the pavement. That should not be a sentence anyone writes in 2026. It is true for me, for the elderly, for mothers pushing prams, for anyone whose balance or stride depends on the surface under their feet being predictable.

A pavement in Malta is not predictable. It rises, and it drops. A slab tilts where the one before it did not. A lamppost stands in the middle of the walkway. A utility cabinet blocks a wheelchair. A feast pole appears for the season and remains long after. Restaurant chairs spill across the kerb. A potted plant the size of a small car sits outside a front door. Where this is the choreography of a morning walk, the road – flat, continuous, designed for movement – becomes the safer option. That is the inversion I want to name.

The standards exist. That is the uncomfortable part of this story. Malta does not lack rules. It has rules for everything, and applies almost none of them. Transport Malta’s Volume 7 – Directives for the Standardisation of Pavements for Traffic Areas – was reaffirmed by Infrastructure Malta in March 2023 and is given force of law through Subsidiary Legislation 499.57. The Access for All Design Guidelines were transposed into law through Legal Notice 198 of 2019. The Equal Opportunities (Persons with Disability) Act of 2000 makes it unlawful to treat a disabled person less favourably. Malta ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2012.

Two frameworks. Four instruments of law. One continuous obligation. And still, a pavement on which the disabled are safer on the road.

The enforcement architecture is also on paper. A contractor who fails to reinstate a pavement faces an administrative fine of up to €15,000. Reinstatement carries a two-year guarantee. Persistently non-compliant contractors can be excluded for at least six months. Every road works permit must provide a safe pedestrian route. The framework is not missing. It is unused.

The consequence is documented. In October 2018, the First Hall of the Civil Court ordered Fgura Local Council to pay over €40,000 to a resident who had fractured a bone in her foot stumbling in a hole in the pavement of her own street. The court accepted, on the photographic evidence, that the council had failed to keep the pavement in a good state. In March of this year, the Small Claims Tribunal ordered Ħamrun Local Council to pay the medical costs of a woman whose foot fell into a deep hole on the pavement of Triq Dun Ġorġ Preca. The council was found liable.

I want to name what is happening here. The compensation is coming from public funds – from the transfers that fund the council, which is to say, from the same residents whose pavements are failing. The citizen pays once in the taxes that fund the council. The citizen pays a second time when the council loses the case. Between the two payments, nothing has changed. The pavement is still there. The next resident is on course for the same fall.

The system is, at the level of individual compensation, working. What it is not doing is learning. Each judgment is absorbed as a cost, not received as a signal. The standards continue to exist unenforced.

Councils are not the sole authors of the damage. Utility providers open trenches and reinstate them badly. Property owners modify the pavement outside their own front door, and the inconsistent profile of a Maltese street is often the product of a dozen private decisions taken without authority. The regulatory framework reaches all of them. The question is why the powers are not used.

The proposal does not require a new law. It requires the existing law to be treated as law. Road works permits and reinstatement inspections should be published and enforced. The fines in the statute book should be levied when earned. Unauthorised modification of the pavement should carry a serious and consistently applied fine. A pavement reinstated without a continuous, level, obstacle-free route for a wheelchair is a pavement that has not been reinstated.

The standards are written. The fines are set. The guarantees are specified. The accessibility obligations are in law. What is missing is the decision, year after year, to apply them. That decision does not require legislation. It requires enforcement. It requires a Local Council that inspects before it pays. It requires an authority that withholds a permit until a pedestrian route has been laid. It requires a contractor who is fined when the reinstatement fails, and excluded when the pattern repeats. Every one of these powers is already on the statute book. None of them is self-executing. A pavement that is safer to avoid than to use is the visible record of an enforcement regime that has been designed and then set aside.

That is a policy failure. It is also a policy choice. One can be corrected by the other.

David Spiteri Gingell is a Governance, Institutional, and Digital Transformation Consultant