It is now bordering on the ridiculous. Pretty much everyone had the same experience yesterday... bumper to bumper traffic all over Malta as people tried to get to work.

We are living in a society where it takes over an hour to make a 12 kilometre commute and the sheer density of the traffic we have to endure is enough to (excuse the pun) drive you round the bend.

Traffic is not a new problem for Malta, we have endure it for decades. But it really is becoming a flashpoint. An average drive to work would see your average, even tempered, motorist being involved in at least two or three incidents of roadrage and, shall we call it, traffic mouth. Not only that, but the amount of near collisions as people jostle for lane positioning beggars belief. Of course, if there is just one bumper to bumper accident, then the whole thing goes even more bananas. You see, there were some terribly short sighted individuals who built Malta’s main thoroughfare without – yes, you read that correctly – without a hard shoulder for motorists to pull into the side of if there is an accident or a breakdown. That is, of course, hard to fix, so we will just have to make do with what we have in that respect.

The previous government appointed a task force to find a way to alleviate the gridlock. It worked for a short time, but after a while it went back to what we associate as normal. This government has also pledged to tackle the issue, but the truth is that it seems to be getting worse, not better. A lot of the blame was put on the bendy buses, and while these were the bane of motorists on both our islands, the truth lies deeper. Statistics issued by the National Statistics Office this week showed that there were about 320,000 licenced vehicles in Malta. Considering we have a population of about 420,000 the number of vehicles on the road is truly massive. Of course, we live on an island where public transport – despite the attempts of many – is, was and probably always will be absolutely rubbish. But something has got to give. People cannot continue to live like this. We need a proper mass public transport system that will get you to work and back home without fuss and in good time if we are ever going to solve this problem. We need more flyovers and the two that are in the pipeline for Regional Road and the Marsa intersection just cannot come soon enough. Having said that, by the time they are completed, we will all probably be flying to work in our hover cars. The PM has spoken about bread and butter issues. Well, this is well and truly one of them. Driving in Malta has become a living nightmare.