There are times, and they have increasingly grown more prevalent than just at morning rush hour, when one finds oneself in a queue of cars moving slowly towards a roundabout.

Then, as soon as one is free of that roundabout, one moves on to the next queue moving to the next one. And so ad infinitum. Or so it seems.

We really did not need Monday’s press release by NSO telling us there are almost as many cars as there are people in Malta. We know that. We face that, on a daily basis.

Yet we also seem bent to make things worse for ourselves. The roundabouts are a case in point. One can almost hear traffic planners exclaim: Why all the fuss? There are roundabouts everywhere. When we introduced roundabouts they had long been in action everywhere.

That is true and at the same time not true at all. While roundabouts are used sparely abroad, in Malta they have become the rule of every crossing which for one reason or another could not be otherwise solved. It would seem our traffic planners, faced with a difficulty as to who to award right of way, plumped for a roundabout to keep everybody happy. Or everybody in despair.

There must be some statistic somewhere which records how many roundabouts there are to a square mile. We are sure Malta, here as well, is a world beater.

Our roundabouts are now pleasant to look at, ever since ELC started to take care of the landscaping. But that only sugars the pill: Many times they are far bigger than needed.

Take the one between Lija and Iklin, for instance. All cars grind to a crawl at most hours of the day only then to find themselves shunted into a one-lane road. Hence the crawl around the roundabout slows down ever further, nerves get frayed and people just push their car for every little advantage they may get.

There is a further reflection to make with regard to this specific roundabout. Over the past years we have rebuilt roads which people rarely use, and yet we are still lumped with notorious bottlenecks like this, or like the Msida confusion, about which nothing, but nothing has been done.

It is only some years hence, if we are lucky, that we begin to see sense unravelling this roundabout business. There is a plan, still on paper and not without controversy (what isn’t, in Malta?) to replace that other bottleneck that is the Kappara roundabout with an underpass.

For the truth of the matter is that instead of building a roundabout everywhere, traffic flow would have been infinitely helped by an underpass at most points.

The real problem about traffic flow in Malta is that unless a radical solution is found, we will waste so many hours of our short lives waiting in queues at roundabout after roundabout. Things are not only not getting any better, they are actually getting worse, much worse. We are nearing gridlock at most hours.

Unless the traffic flow issue is faced up to, and it takes courage to do so, all the money that has been spent, for instance on the public transport reform, only made things worse. For we did replace the old buses with newer (and wider) buses but they still crawl along reduced to a walking pace by the queues of cars waiting at roundabouts.

There has been a timid approach with the introduction and enforcement of a few bus lanes but that’s clearly not enough. Against a mountain of objections, dedicated routes or even roads must be found for these ungainly buses instead of their clogging the main roads and getting delayed in return. It is now very clear that the buses can never expect to keep to their timings when they get caught up in traffic jams. Once their timings are haphazard and sure not to be kept, the public can never come to believe that buses are an effective alternative. Hence more cars on the roads, hence more gridlock.

Ultimately, one must look at the possibility of the introduction of mass public transport systems from the main centres. But that’s in the far future. The failure of the new much-touted Arriva system makes one chary about suggesting further improvements.