Congestion trends
Everything else on this site shows you the roads right now. This page is the memory: we continuously record our island-wide Malta Traffic Index and publish what it adds up to — how congestion actually behaves by hour of day and day of week, measured rather than guessed. As far as we know, nobody else publishes this data for Malta.
Average congestion by hour of day
Malta Traffic Index (1–100) averaged across the last 14 recorded days · 401 samples.
Recent days
Index through the day for the latest recorded days — brightest line is the most recent.
Day-of-week pattern
| Day | Average index | Worst reading | Samples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon | 22 | 64 | 35 |
| Tue | 22 | 46 | 47 |
| Wed | 24 | 70 | 60 |
| Thu | 20 | 50 | 64 |
| Fri | 19 | 39 | 68 |
| Sat | 9 | 30 | 69 |
| Sun | 6 | 19 | 58 |
How this is measured
The Malta Traffic Index is a single 1–100 number summarising how slow the island's main road network is compared to free-flow conditions. It blends two measurements taken from a fixed panel of monitoring points on Malta's motorway, primary and secondary roads: the weighted Travel Time Index (how much longer journeys take right now versus an empty road) and the congested segment ratio (what share of the monitored points are currently slowed or blocked).
Samples are recorded continuously through the day, roughly every half hour, using the same TomTom Flow Segment data that powers the live map — the difference is that here we keep it. Each sample stores the index, the raw Travel Time Index and the congested ratio; the charts above aggregate them by hour and by weekday. Days with too few samples are shown but weighted only by what was actually measured — we never interpolate or invent readings.
Two honest caveats. First, sampling density follows site usage, so overnight hours can have thinner coverage than daytime — a missing bar means no measurements in that hour, not zero traffic. Second, the index describes the main network, not every side street: a village feast can paralyse one locality while the island-wide index barely moves. For locality-level detail, see the area pages and cameras.
See what the index reads right now on the live map, or read Best and Worst Times to Drive in Malta for the practical conclusions.
Gaps shown as gaps — never interpolated.