Transportation planning and Valletta

Abstract

Every textbook seriously dealing with transport, emphasises the fact that a society's developments are highly related to its transportation system. There exists a strong link between the level of efficiency of a transport system and the standard of living of the society it is serving. But this link is also a reciprocal and dynamic one, because any changes that occur in the different aspects of society also have repercussions on transportation. travel patterns, and hence on To start with, members of different sectors of society need to travel, and each sector has its different requirements. Therefore an efficient system has ta cater for the young, the aged, the workers, the unemployed, as well as for the rich and the poor. Today's society requires a system which is flexible and ready to adapt to changes in its population structure. Population increase brings about the need for new residential areas, which is generally followed by urban sprawl. This, very often, puts a heavy demand on transportation networks. But then, if it were not for an already existing network, most of this sprawl would not have occurred in the first place. One cannot consider the development of a society's economy without dealing, with the system of transportation. Raw materials are transported to production centres; the man-power for production needs to travel; and the finished products have to be transported to centres of commerce, from which they are sold to consumers, who generally, also have to travel to get there.