This week, it finally happened: it took me almost two hours to undertake what should have been a 30-minute drive. It wasn’t even rush hour; it was the middle of the day.

As I sat in my car angrily cancelling the appointments I had left the house for, appointments booked weeks in advance, I couldn’t help but think about the fact that, unsurprisingly, our budget has yet again disregarded the fact that the country is heaving under the weight of its people’s cars while administration after administration looks in the opposite direction.

According to the National Statistics Office, in the third quarter of 2022, 65 motor vehicles were newly licensed each day. Yes, you read that right, 65 vehicles a day. A little more than half of those vehicles were cars which means that, by the end of the year, there will be thousands more cars on our already gridlocked roads.

According to the NSO, in Q3 of 2022, 65 vehicles were newly licensed each day- Anna Marie Galea

Okay, I hear you say, but what is the solution? Well, for starters, does everyone need to have their bum in an office chair at a physical office to do their job? If there were any lessons to be taken from the COVID-19 debacle, this would have definitely been one of them – many of us don’t need to leave the house to do our job efficiently.

It would have been so easy for companies to take advantage of the systems that had already been put in place during the pandemic and, yet, many Maltese managers remain resistant to change and are demanding that everyone come into the office so that they can watch their employees work like Big Brother. And, honestly, for what?

By the time your employees arrive at the office, they’re already tired, frazzled and fed up with having to battle the traffic beast for hours. They also end up sleeping less because they need to wake up earlier and earlier to get to work. How could anyone imagine that this is a good combo?

As job satisfaction and quality of life go down, more and more employees will be quiet quitting, doing the bare minimum required to keep their job and not a jot more.

And if you absolutely can’t give up the idea of seeing your beloved employees wriggling around in their chairs, even a hybrid arrangement where you get to see them in the office twice a week would be preferable to making everyone join the supposedly festa-related traffic every morning. There are so many ways around this.

Of course, there was not a whisper of the fabled metro to be heard during the budget. I imagine any money that could have gone to that will be used to continue to patch up and widen our hideous, weeping sore roads that eventually all end up in bottlenecks and make more obstacle courses to get through as soon as we rustle up the courage to leave the house.

Or maybe they’ll finally employ someone who has the ability to see further than the tip of his own nose and who can actually plan when and where roadworks happen so that we don’t need to suffer through a symphony of mismanagement. Now, tell me that traffic is a perception; I dare you.