Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1545155
11 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 31 MAY 2026 NEWS minute of traffic costs Malta Here is the full bill costs Malta €1.13 billion annually, excluding parking, emissions, and the €174 million spent on road Zammit about the cost of traffic congestion cludes several high costs. Parking alone, he estimates, adds rough- ly five minutes per trip, around three minutes searching and two minutes walk- ing to the destina- tion, which across four trips a day for 400,000 commuters amounts to another 20 minutes of wasted time daily per person, on top of the 25 already counted. Then there are the costs he has not yet tried to quantify. The land taken up by cars is one of the most striking. Cremona cal- culates that the space occupied by Malta's private cars, roads, public parking, private parking and garages is equivalent to 823 football pitches. Based on residential land values in Malta of €2,500- €4,000 per square metre, he estimates the value of that land at between €6 billion and €13 billion. Other excluded costs include greenhouse gas emissions, in an area where Malta is al- ready failing to meet EU tar- gets; the public health burden of daily congestion; the risk to emergency services delayed by gridlock; and the €174 million the government spent in 2025 alone on road maintenance and upgrades to keep pace with a car fleet growing by around 5,600 ve- hicles a year. On top of that, 5,600 new cars a year, at an average of €25,000 each, represent €140 million in capital leaving Malta annual- ly to pay for imported vehicles, and that figure does not account for the cost of replacing existing cars, spare parts, servicing, or consumables. The Momentum proposal, Cre- mona noted, addresses private passenger cars only and excludes commercial vehicles, motor- bikes, and cabs from its calcula- tions. Worst in Europe Malta's situation is not simply bad by local standards. Accord- ing to available data, Malta has the highest traffic congestion in Europe and ranks second global- ly, behind Colombia. The average congestion level is around 45%, meaning a peak- hour trip takes nearly twice as long as it would under free-flow conditions. For comparison, other heavily congested Euro- pean countries such as Greece and Ireland hover around 31%. Drivers in the Valletta area lose an estimated 94 hours a year in peak-hour traffic alone. Malta also has one of the high- est car ownership rates in Eu- rope, with an estimated 797 vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants and around 18,000 vehicles per square kilometre of road. According to NSO statistics, at the end of December 2025, there were 457,403 licensed motor ve- hicles in Malta, of which 73.4% were passenger cars. Not the first attempt, but the most complete This is not the first time any- one has attempted to quantify Malta's congestion. A report by BusinessNow found that Maltese drivers lose nearly four days a year in rush-hour traffic, while a transport master plan previously warned that traffic costs could reach €917 million by 2030. Cremona's calculation, howev- er, is the first to combine time and fuel into a single current fig- ure and set it alongside the coun- try's capital investment spending in the same year. So, the next time you are stuck in traffic, think about what you could be doing with an extra 25 minutes in your day. Ing. Marco Cremona Malta has around 400,000 commuters who rely on private cars, making four trips a day, averaging 25 minutes per trip. Cremona estimates that 25% of that time is pure waste; time spent sitting still in congestion rather than travelling