Chris Bonett
Minister for Transport · Partit Laburista
- True 0 0%
- Mostly true 2 100%
- + Context 0 0%
- Mixed opinion 0 0%
- Unproven 0 0%
- Misleading 0 0%
- Unlikely 0 0%
- False 0 0%
Yes — there are fewer cars being registered daily in Malta now than two years ago. NSO new-registration data (NR-085-2026, Table 2) shows 14,433 passenger cars newly licensed in 2023, falling to 14,104 in 2025 — a reduction of 329 cars/year, or about one fewer car registered per day (39.5/day → 38.6/day). The directional claim is supported. The qualifier on Mostly True is that the fall is modest in size — 2.3% across two years — and the path was non-monotonic: 2024 was actually the peak (15,071 cars, 41.3/day) before the 2025 dip brought the rate back below 2023. 'Started to fall' captures the right direction but slightly overstates a softer-than-it-sounds movement. The substantive answer is yes, but the policy-relevant magnitude is small.
Total public transport ridership rose from 48.05M (2017) to 67.24M (2023, +36.6% YoY — first full year of free PT) and continued climbing to 75.8M (2024, +12.7%), with August 2025 alone hitting a record-breaking 7.48M passengers (+10.5% YoY for that month). That is genuinely substantial — +57.7% across 2017-2024, with the gains concentrated in the free-PT era. But population grew ~24% over the same window (460K → ~570K), so on a per-capita basis the strengthening is materially smaller: 104.5 trips/resident/year (2017) → 121.6 (2023) → ~133 (2024) = +27% per capita across seven years. Substantial direction holds; the load-bearing magnitude is the per-capita figure, not the +57.7% headline. The NSO dashboard's Maltese-vs-Non-Maltese split is a flat 75/25 ratio applied uniformly across all years (not measured data), so it's not possible from public data to isolate whether Maltese-national ridership specifically rose or whether the increase is driven by non-resident growth.