Malta traffic hotspots: where jams keep coming back

Throughout the day we record the traffic incidents that TomTom publishes for Malta and Gozo, and keep them. Most of what the feed reports on a normal day is queueing traffic; the rest is road closures and roadworks.

We count days, not reports. A single queue can be reported several times in an afternoon, so counting reports would reward places that happen to be re-announced often. Instead, the map is divided into squares of roughly 200 metres, neighbouring squares within 300 metres are joined into one place, and each place is scored by how many different days it had a queue. Days without any recorded data are left out of the count rather than counted as quiet.

A place is listed only if it had queues on at least 50% of recorded days, and only the top 20 are shown. Places with the same number of days share a rank. Closures and roadworks are not ranked, because a single roadworks site can sit in the same spot for weeks and would look like a daily jam; where they were recorded at a hotspot, it is noted.

Names come from the traffic feed itself. Sometimes that is a street and sometimes only a locality; where the feed gives no name, the nearest area is shown instead. The hour shown is when queues at that place most often began, in Malta time. The colour follows how often queues returned: red on almost every day, orange on most days, amber on the rest.