Traffic is now a universal part of the Maltese experience.  People are stuck in it every day in the morning and every day in the evening.

Commutes are getting longer and longer.  Official events end up getting delayed because people got stuck in traffic trying to get there.  University students are having to get up at unearthly hours of the morning to avoid the rush hour and to find parking, before then catching up on a couple of hours of sleep in their car. 

Much has been said about the possible solutions. 

A mass transport system has been mooted by both sides of the political divide, but it feels like a never-ending pipe dream which will remain on paper, particularly as the man in control of the country's finances continues to be sceptical about the project's numbers.

The much spoken about scheme for young people to forfeit their driving licence appears to have been a waste of money - and that's without even taking into consideration that the government still refuses to say how many people have actually forfeited their licence.

There are plenty of other ideas and potential measures that people float around whenever this discussion is brought up - ideas and measures of varying degrees of realism, pragmatism, and cost.

However, for some reason, what is perhaps one of the most obvious measures that can have an immediate and significant impact on the country's traffic levels is not spoken about nearly as often as it should be.

The concept of remote working or teleworking was steadily on the increase over the years, but the Covid-19 pandemic thrust it into the mainstream of how we work - mainly because employers had little to no choice but to adopt it.

When the world emerged from the pandemic, remote working as a practice endured: workers quite liked it, and it didn't seem to have any impact on employee productivity - that meant that it became a perk which employees sought in an ever-increasingly competitive job market.

Today you will still find it present, either in fully remote jobs or else, more commonly, in the form of hybrid work, where workers work part of the week remotely and the other part from the office.  It is, however, becoming less and less common - many companies are having their employees return to the office for more of the week.

This means more people getting in their cars every morning to commute to an office and every evening to commute back home.  It means more traffic. More pollution. More time wasted sitting behind a steering wheel. More frustration.

All of this can be avoided with a proper shift to remote working - or at the least, hybrid working.

The government can lead by example in this sense: how many civil service jobs can be done with greater teleworking involved? Can the government then look into incentives to encourage the private sector, where possible, to offer such working arrangements as well.

Each person working from home is a car taken off the road for a day.  It is an improvement to people's quality of life, and it is an improvement to the country's environment as well.

As far as short-term measures go, this is an idea that is sitting there, ready to have an impact, and ready to be introduced.