If you visited Malta more than 3 years ago, chances are you took one of those old rattling yellow buses which are still memorialized in the form of plaster souvenirs all over the island. You may have enjoyed the novelty, but would not have relished relying on those aging, stiflingly heated hunks of metal to meet your daily commuting needs.
Arriva took over in the middle of summer 2011 with bright and shiny buses imported from Sweden and London. The bright and shiny buses proceeded to burst into flames just about as soon as they were introduced to the unforgiving Maltese weather. That’s if they turned up at the right time, or at all. Safe to say that Arriva did not always live up to it’s name.
All this is a rather lengthy way of saying that people don’t much like taking buses in this country. Particularly the Maltese people – tourists often don’t have much of a choice.
There are two models of transport in what I’m going to refer to for the sake of short-hand as ‘The Western World’. Much of Europe follows a socialistic type of model whereby taxes pay for efficient public transport to ferry people around the place. In the US, they adhere to the more capitalistic* ‘every man for himself’ notion whereby if you don’t have a car then you’ve got a problem.
A combination of car-worship, along with a strong dislike of the public transport alternative, has led to some pretty clogged up roads in these parts.
Take a look at these numbers:
Malta population 420,000
Below driving age 85,000
Private Vehicles 325,000
So that’s just about one car for everyone who can legally drive in the country, making Malta 5th** in the world for car ownership per capita.
It has gotten to the stage where your average Maltese person would no more take the bus (or walk) down the street to the shops than they would take a hot-air balloon. Because everyone has the same attitude, the traffic is brutal, and covering the miniscule distances on the island takes an age. Parking is at a premium, so people don’t bother looking for a space and instead just double park in the middle of the street whenever they feel the need to pop into a Pastizzeria. This does nothing whatsoever to aid the congestion.
It’s a bit like walking on wet cement. If one person does it, others see the footsteps and can tut-tut to themselves as they skirt around the still drying area of pavement. But once three or four people have tramped their footprints into the cement, then everyone feels free to leave their mark. Likewise, stopping your car in the middle of the street while you nip in to get the shopping has become such a widely accepted thing to do here that everyone’s at it.
(Everyone except the unfortunate bus passengers, although in saying that the driver of the bus this afternoon did stop to go and buy a lottery ticket from a kiosk in Bugibba, which wasn’t great for traffic flow).
A new bus company is due to take over the buses early next year, if we can believe the transport minister. So will they solve the transport mess in Malta?
The main objective has got to be getting people out of their cars and onto the buses. So there needs to be more buses running more frequently. The price has to be attractive enough and the routes more sensible than they are right now. Pre-paid tickets is a head-slappingly obvious thing that Arriva failed to introduce***, and it would at least cut down on some of the delays as people fumble through their bags and pockets for change.
I don’t know if this happens elsewhere, but Dublin bus encourage people to buy pre-paid tickets by not giving change when you pay on the bus. You just get an ‘IOU’ on your ticket which you can only redeem by taking it to head office, which most people don’t bother with. So it’s a nice little earner for the bus company and means most people learn pretty quickly to buy the tickets before boarding.
However good it is though, a new bus company will not solve the problem of small, winding, and sometimes poorly maintained roads. And it’s going to take a lot to prise the good citizens of Malta out of their nice cars and into the buses – no matter how bright and shiny the latest fleet of said buses looks.
We’ll see what happens, but I’m not expecting any major changes unless the government starts hitting drivers in their pay-cheques, with increased taxes and charges.
*Funnily enough the principal sports in both regions adopt opposite systems. European football is capitalism at it’s most extreme, whereas American football does everything it can to make all teams as equal as possible.
**See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Malta#cite_ref-2 – (2009 survey)
***The Arriva system had ticket sellers standing at a few busy stops selling vouchers. You then had to give the voucher to the driver in exchange for a ticket. Tourists did not understand this system, and why should they have? – it was moronic.
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Having just returned from Malta, I pretty well agree with everything you have said here but would offer the following comments:
– The new buses that Arriva introduced came from China, not Sweden.
– It is the Government that specifies the routes and the fares in Malta, not the bus operator.
– I am fairly certain that there are are more bus journeys being operated than under the old regime and in many cases by bigger buses. Therefore as it is standing room only on most buses into and out of Valletta, more people must be travelling by bus but yet the traffic continues to get worse !
Part of the problem is that there is a lack of discipline by Maltese car drivers who in addition to double parking, will abandon their cars half in and half out of a parking space, or stop in the middle of the road to have an animated conversation with someone. However, there is also a lack of car parks and with most roadside parking taken, one does wonder whether part of the problem is with drivers hovering or driving round in circles looking for someone to park.
As always, I defer to your wisdom on such matters Phil, so I’ll take it from you that the shonky buses were of Chinese origin. More buses may be running, but a lot of them seem to double up on the same routes. Some are empty, others at a premium. I got the X3 the other evening from Paola to Bugibba: What a Joke! Two people on a rickety bus, mandated 15 minute break at Mdina to pick up non-existent passengers, which in reality is a coffee break for the driver and a waste of time for the passengers. Imagine people landing at the airport and having that as their first experience of Malta! An Embarrassment. I don’t care who takes over running the buses in future, I just hope they demand that their senior execs use them every day to see exactly what is going on, instead of sitting in hermetically sealed 4 wheel drives and picking up a cheque.
Parking is a problem because too many cars because people hate the buses because… and on it goes.
I’d go further and make it compulsory for government ministers and senior civil servants to use buses on all work-related journeys. Then they’d have an incentive to address the issues.
Having visited Malta 15 times in the past nine years I’ve experienced the bus service before, during and after Arriva. The newer buses are much better than the earlier ones and produce far less pollution. But the bus service will never run reliably to time when there is so much traffic congestion to throw the timetables way off course. As the present government has been finding out, operating a fleet of modern buses is much more expensive than the old ones were, when much of the cost was concealed by the fact that the owner-drivers and their families did a lot of the maintenance work in their own time, whereas with a bus operating company it has to be costed and charged for. I hope the government sticks to its present course and is prepared to pay the necessary subsidy to provide a service as reliable as possible. Tax-paying car owners may not like it but in my opinion they too benefit by there being less pollution, a bus service for tourists who are a very important part of Malta’s economy, and the avoidance of yet more private car traffic. The government should also carry out a major road rebuilding programme which would in turn reduce the damage to the buses and consequent maintenance costs.
I’d love to see the Maltese Minister for Travel wedged next to me on the number 12 bus one morning, but sadly I don’t think it’s too likely. I agree with your other very well-made points too. But this is not an insoluble issue. Yes Malta is overcrowded, but it is also small enough to be very well served by a top class transport system. People are using their cars for ridiculously small journeys and clogging up streets, because they are not incentivized to do otherwise. It has to become less attractive to drive, and more attractive to use public transfer (or to cycle, or even – God forbid – to Walk!). And I’m afraid the only way to do that is with the big stick of taxation. However in tightly contested 2 party democracy, is one party going to risk making this doubtless very unpopular decision?