It was a Friday evening and, as I pulled down the shutters of the shop I work in, I was looking forward to a beer and a lie-in.

Between my full-time hustle and my part-time job as a copywriter, I clock up around 70 hours a week to make ends meet. Like many youths my age, I am gearing up to leave Malta for greener (literally and figuratively) pastures and I need to save as much as I can. I say this somewhat reluctantly because I actually love our island.

I hop onto the 49 bus and pop my headphones in, happy that there is a free seat which is not being drenched by the leaking cooling system.

I don’t drive any more, it just doesn’t seem worth it. And, anyway, on the bus I can get more reading done.

The traffic jam began as the bus pulled out of Mosta.

“Surely an accident of some sort. Rush hour cannot last till 8pm, even with the abysmal state of our infrastructure,” I thought to myself.

I’m fairly patient and can stomach the slow-moving traffic. Many of us locals or expats living here for over 10 years find it incredibly frustrating that a short journey which would take less than 15 minutes a decade ago now takes about double the time.

But, this time, it was very different. The journey from Mosta to Burmarrad took an hour.

Passengers groaned as the bus ground to a halt at the top of the hill leading down past Bidnija next to the sun-bleached “Justice for Daphne” sign.

So, when the banners of the Burmarrad festa began to creep over the horizon, revealing also the poorly manned police barricade lazily diverting traffic around the local festivities, the disgruntled murmur in the bus grew louder.

Police stood by doing virtually nothing except waving us on. There were no signs alerting drivers, forcing bus drivers to abandon their vehicles in search of an alternative way around the cordoned off point.

Hats off to the bus drivers for managing to prevent a riot among their passengers using a mix of broken English and their native language.

“Pajjiż fallut” (a country gone to the dogs), a man murmured as the bus finally cleared the Burmarrad bottleneck after an hour and a half of waiting. He was the only Maltese fellow on the bus too. The sweaty tourists and minimum wage economic migrants did not seem too pleased about the lengthy escapade either. We all looked like we had had a long day.

The traffic is reflective of the state of a nation, akin to a reactionary entity that adds a traffic lane here and a bribe there- Alexander Galea

I believe it is only in these absurd moments of hours-long traffic for journeys that the Maltese finally leave their red and blue camps and wake up to the grim reality that their leadership is trying to erect a first-world service economy interconnected by single-lane cart rut infrastructure.

The traffic is reflective of the state of a nation, akin to a reactionary entity that adds a traffic lane here and a bribe there, just to patch things up and keep the whole operation running. It’s laughable.

Tourists who frequent our island usually pick up on the lack of central planning by the time they have reached their hotel. There just isn’t any. Malta is not designed for infinite economic progress despite its visions of skyscrapers and big-business investment.

Malta, or, at least, the suits in parliament, wants to have its cake and eat it.

We cannot have our Dubai in the Mediterranean that Joseph Muscat promised us all those years ago while we are still willing to close off arterial parts of the red-lining, life-supported infrastructure in the name of a village feast.

It just doesn’t make sense.

We must either choose the quiet Malta of years ago together with all of the endangered traditional aspects we used to enjoy. Or we continue to ignore the fat cats on their destructive crusade to rape and construct their way into some pseudo futurist, metropolis that we allowed them to trade in for our thousands of years of vernacular history.

In other words, destroy all that was basically genuine about Malta in the first place.

All I ask is make up your mind. I can’t stand this traffic anymore.

Alexander Galea is a freelance writer with an interest in defence, politics, history and culture.