Earlier this year I wrote a tongue-in-cheek article about how the humble parasol could contribute to solving issues of obesity and traffic congestion across the islands. This week it’s the turn of the garage to address the issues of our overstretched roads and – at a stretch – the high national rate of domestic violence.
A garage is often a place of wonder, a man-shed extraordinaire. It can be a Tardis that Doctor Who would envy which reeks of nostalgia and time travel: an old plough speaks of fields known and loved; a luzzu tells of early-morning fishing, or a vintage vehicle gives hours of pleasure, polishing, reminiscing and Sunday driving.
Others are an Aladdin’s cave of antiques or junk. Or peer through an open door and you’ll see produce, nature’s jewels glistening ready for market, tomato red, fire orange and sunshine lemons. There might even be a songbird chirping in a cage at the door.
And many, of course, also hold the cars used on a daily basis to get to work, to shuttle the children to football or gymnastics, to visit Nanna or do the weekly shop. They nestle safe behind closed shutters overnight like a hidden chameleon in an olive grove.
And yet, in the late evening, the early morning, and the heat of the day too, our roads are lined with parked cars that don’t have the luxury of a roof over their mechanical heads when they’re not in use, making the way through narrower, more congested and more dangerous. This is because many of our homes don’t come with garages and this is a problem we could address in all future developments across the island.
Eighteen months ago, for complicated family reasons, my husband and I considered moving to a different village. We even got as far as finding the ‘perfect’ flat in a brand-new block of apartments with a gorgeous westerly view from which to watch the sunset. It would have been a financial stretch, but when looking for a new place, who doesn’t try and add an extra bedroom or bathroom, a larger balcony or some other luxury?
We hoped there would still be garage space below. Yes, beneath these new apartments there were underground garages aplenty…. And we could have our pick because, even though ‘our’ apartment was the second to last to be sold, almost no one had bought one of the garages.
Presumably, this was because the price tag ran close to €60,000, more than 20% of the price of that flat itself. And while these continue to stand empty, the narrow road on which the block stands, on the outskirts of a Gozitan village, is now crammed with the cars of the new flat dwellers.
This begs the question, is there any point in insisting that developers and construction magnates incorporate garages into the designs of their developments without also insisting that the garages are sold in tandem with every apartment; that the price of an apartment includes accompanying space for one or two cars?
If we were to take this approach going forward, we’d struggle less with the double parking and road blockages due to parked cars, the traffic on our streets would flow a little more easily, and there’d be less road rage at rush hour.
You might even hope that, if the car journey home has not served as a pent-up pressure cooker of anger, and if the garage offers a sanctuary in which any riled spouse can let off steam among the football paraphernalia, woodworking tools or fishing magazine archives, we might even see a tad less domestic violence reported on this portal.
