Malta's On-the-Ground Gridlocks Should be Solved by Widespread Use of eVTOLs

Malta's infrastructure is bursting at the seams. An island of narrow streets is now having to handle ever-increasing inflows of foreign tourists enjoying summer holidays and foreign workers lured by the growing economy. The quaint two-lane "highways" crisscrossing the island are now frequently home to snaking traffic jams, with motorists having nowhere to escape amidst the lack of alternative thoroughfares in densely populated towns and rugged rocky terrains of the mountainous interior. As the economy and population continue to grow, Malta will see more frustrations on the road.

And that frustration is likely to lead to a bigger sociopolitical issue that cannot simply be fixed through infrastructure-building. Among the native population unused to Malta's current status as a country of 20% foreigners, xenophobia feeds on discontent. It is all too easy to reminisce about the more relaxed, simpler times of the recent past when foreigners were few and far between if the comparison is a clearly negative picture of slower commutes and more crowded streets for those who are unused to such in what is supposed to be idyllic rural landscape.

Thus, making sure people can get to places in time is no longer just a practical issue of economic efficiency. It will be ever more prominent as an emotional issue that underpins whether there will be enough popular support to keep Malta ethnically and culturally diverse. Without a way to keep people moving, frayed nerves can gradually but systematically turn into hostility, ending Malta's decade-long experiment with mass immigration that has turned the country into one of the best-performing economies in the EU.

Despite the urgency, Malta does not exactly have realistic options to drastically build up infrastructure in scale or speed. The dense subdivision of land ownership, whether for real estate or agriculture, means getting enough buy-in to build a new road will be costly and time-consuming, even if the terrain poses no engineering obstacles. The Malta Metro underground rapid transit project, while planned, will take decades to come into being, without even accounting for the inevitable protests and construction delays. This is not an immediate solution that solves the already apparent infrastructure issue of today.

A solution may be to better utilize the sky above us. With the rapid development of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, flying through the sky between different destinations within Malta could become a realistic solution to offset the gridlock at the street level. These massive drones with automated driving systems can be particularly useful in this Mediterranean island geography, given the short distances, clear visibility from the constant blue sky, and availability of less built-up areas near major towns and resorts.

As far-fetched as the army of sky taxis may sound, it might be more realistic than building actual expressways or railways crossing the island. Heliports to be used for eVTOLs use a fraction of the land needed for lengthy roads, meaning that convincing one big landowner would do for access to one town, instead of a string of landowners with their land plots lined up the right way. Approving regulations to decide how and where quiet electric vehicles can fly may face less resistance than proposals to dig up tunnels below centuries-old buildings that populate their paths.

Of course, the project is not exactly 100% up to Malta. To commercialize such a novel way of transport would require buy-in from the European authorities, who are not exactly thrilled with the reality that Chinese manufacturers are leading the race to make affordable eVTOLs a reality. The European authorities are already combatting the deluge of Chinese solar panels, electric vehicles, and batteries into the continent, upping the tariffs in a bid to save local manufacturing in the next generation of cutting-edge hardware. A Maltese proposal to import eVTOLs from China will no doubt face red tape.

But ultimately, the issue should be up to the feasibility of technology rather than political resistance, global or local. The need for continued economic development is a common motivation that unites Malta, Europe, and beyond. The resulting infrastructural bottlenecks and the inability to quickly resolve them are also felt more than just on this particular island. In a bid to ensure that growth driven by today's openness to population growth is replaced with xenophobic protectionism, somebody in the world should pioneer mass uages of the skies for every transport. Malta, with immediate traffic, should lead the pack.