Traffic congestion will not vanish soon, former transport minister Austin Gatt had said five years ago.
His prophetic words were backed up by figures released at the time that confirmed the ever increasing use of private cars as a mode of transport.
The National Household Travel Survey carried out in 2010 found that the use of private cars was the preferred mode of transport of 59 per cent of respondents, up from 41 per cent two decades earlier.
At the same time bus usage dropped to 11 per cent from 24 per cent.
There is little to suggest the trend has changed as motorists started feeling the pressure of heavier congestion since schools reopened last week. The situation was made worse last Friday as bad weather flooded key areas and left motorists fuming for hours in clogged roads.
For entrepreneur Anġlu Xuereb there is no escaping the fact that there are too many cars on the road.
Although he advocates improving existing junctions to help ease traffic flow, the long-term solution, he insists, lies elsewhere.
“People have to be encouraged to use their private car less and to do so an efficient mass transport system like a monorail has to be considered.”
Mr Xuereb had even floated this idea 25 years ago when he produced a plan of how the monorail would connect the towns around the Grand and the Marsamxett harbours.
Why should somebody waste three hours in traffic either way from work when this could be useful time spent working from home?
He believes the idea is valid more than ever as the roads creak under the pressure of more cars. The latest figures from the National Statistics Office show that in the second quarter this year, private cars accounted for more than 70 per cent of the 5,400 newly registered cars. There were 341,000 licensed vehicles.
“The situation was already acute 25 years ago and things have only got worse,” Mr Xuereb says.
Acknowledging the massive investment required for the project, he says the traffic problem should be tackled through a bipartisan approach because solutions transcend any single legislature.
It is a sentiment shared by Matthew Bezzina, managing director at eCabs, a taxi service, who calls for a national consensus in dealing with traffic congestion.
“Politicians have hard decisions to make unless they want the blood to stop flowing,” he says, as he draws an analogy between the road network and the body’s veins.
Cars are like blood and the veins in which they flow are not keeping up with a body that has grown, he says.
But there are some immediate measures that could ease traffic flow, including better road design.
A spokesman for Maltese Roads Traffic Update, a website and Facebook initiative that monitors traffic, points at one particular 500-metre stretch of road that leads from Mosta to Lija.
“This road has one zebra crossing, two traffic lights and a roundabout exit,” he says, all which contribute to slowing down traffic flow.
Traffic lights should be replaced with intelligent sensors and zebra crossings by subways, he argues. The spokesman calls for incentives to encourage car pooling at the work place and greater use of teleworking. “Why should somebody waste three hours in traffic either way from work when this could be useful time spent working from home?”
But a more radical approach would be to improve road discipline by deducting points that could lead to licence suspension for unruly drivers.
Reducing bad drivers from the road will also lead to fewer cars being driven, he argues.“I am no expert, and these are just simple ideas that could be very effective,” he says.