A short trip to Liverpool, where a lifelong wish to do the Beatles Trail was finally realised, gave me the opportunity to go on an Arriva bus on the way to another famous shrine associated with this great port city – Anfield.

It was a funny feeling, really, as the 20-minute ride took me instantly – and not surprisingly – back to the Bisazza Street Greek tragedy and the start today of the Arriva bus service on our own troubled little island. There were only half a dozen passengers on the bus and only two of us going to the famous stadium. Every other Arriva bus that drove past was either empty or with only a few heads hardly moving on the perfect tarmac of the 2008 European Cultural Capital.

Does this mean most people there still prefer to use their private cars? If they do, then one special propaganda bubble associated with the introduction of the Arriva service in Malta can be considered to have already gone bust.

But I must admit that my Arriva sampling was not at all sour. I was clumsy enough to give the lady driver a 20-pound note to pay for the fare, even though there was no notice anywhere on the bus that one had to tender the exact amount. But rather than going cocky and asking us, in her strong Scouse accent, to climb down and, unlike the famous Reds, walk alone to our destination, she asked us to sit until she collected enough change.

She did not, but was still kind enough to inform us we had reached Anfield, regardless of the fact that we had spotted the huge theatre of football at least 10 minutes earlier. It was exactly a free “ticket to ride”. If that is how Maltese passengers are going to be treated by the much-maligned re-employed public transport employees, then Austin Gatt should merit at least a good point out of ten, at last.

Talking to people who have diligently done their homework on the new service schedule, however, a lot of other questions remain unanswered. Most already deduct it will cost them more to have the same mobility and convenience, but it will be the same or even cheaper if they do some walking. The problem is that many of them are pensioners who would rather avoid... well, walking, from one terminal to some sub-terminal.

Given that pensioners and elderly tourists will make the bulk of passengers using the Arriva bus service, this walking business will create problems for most of them. People are used to having their cheap, ramshackle old bus squeezing loudly along the narrow thoroughfares in the centre or on the outskirts of their villages and towns. Now it seems many of them are being denied this service and expected to walk to one or two fixed points from where to catch the new bus.

Agreed, the business of such connecting and inter-connecting in places like London, Rome, Milan, Madrid, Berlin and other big cities is an everyday thing people are used to. One assumes the thinking is that people here will now need to get used to it too. We are indeed a nation of passengers and drivers who expect to park and double-park outside the newsagent’s while we pick up our daily newspapers and it is about time we learned this cannot go on any longer, but providing a bus service to the people who most need it, pensioners and old-timers, is another story.

If the village and town centres and peripheries are going to be mostly ignored either because of the smaller fleet of buses available or the lack of manoeuvring space, it is going to be difficult for the average passenger to do the expected walking, particularly on rainy days when Malta magically turns into an awkward Venice every time, or on hot summer days when doctors rightly advise you to avoid the scorching Maltese sun.

To overcome this dilemma, a lot of hope is being pinned on Arriva’s feeder service, i.e. the smaller vehicles to get you to the big bus service, one assumes at an extra expense. The higher fare notwithstanding, one has to take into consideration that people will still have to walk from one point to another, change buses and get used to the dictated routes. It is a tall order.

One says so despite the honest wish that things will after all work out. There is a national desire to see the new bus service work better and the new mentality to bring a refreshing change in the public perception of bus drivers and other employees successful.

Privatisation does help in those departments, but it fails in other tests. As we have seen from the privatisation of banks, for example, where profits have been growing while people and employees have been getting the worse part of the bargain. Will it be the same on the buses? People are used to asking the bare-chested bus driver to “drop them” wherever is nearest to their home or point of destination. I doubt the Arriva instructors have trained the newly uniformed drivers on these lines.

Not all “old” bus drivers used to roar angrily back at you if you asked questions about your destination or did not have the exact fare. In fact some of them even kept up a conversation with passengers, especially tourists intrigued by the “In God We Trust” and “Elvis” letterings inside or on the truck’s body. Again, I doubt the Arriva bosses would encourage such harmless banter.

Air-conditioning is of course a belated bonus, albeit making it costlier to run the service. The government-Arriva agreement imposes a sort of two-year freeze on bus fares, though some, as we have seen, will still go up by stealth. That should take us to until 2013 when a general election is due. Politically convenient, to say the least.

It is exactly how Greece and the many facets of its economy were sold to the knackers by a conservative administration before poor old Papandreaou’s son, Papandreaou, took over and is now having to dance to the music of Europe’s “Ode to Joy”.