Don’t expect me to write on the Cyrus Engerer farce today.

I find it immensely humiliating that our political discourse has degenerated from the divorce issue into discussing this querelle of jilted lovers, pen drive vendettas and police ambitions.

It was, I think, more than enough that we arrived at a decision regarding the issue of divorce, not through the normal channels that are supposed to work in a democracy but because one MP broke with political convention and forced the issue through.

Our political discourse is that of a bubble, what we consider as our budding politicians many times tend to sink into incestuousness and it serves us right if people move from one side to the other not for any ideological purpose but for private consideration. We get the politicians we deserve, just as we also get the media we deserve.

On the contrary, allow me once again to refer to a subject that I have been writing about for the past weeks – Arriva’s disaster. Maybe many might think the subject over-exposed, though no one, as far as I can see, thinks the subject is not news anymore because it has been corrected. It has not: Arriva is almost as bad as it was on 3 July.

Last Monday, I caught the X 1 from Ċirkewwa and got to work in good time. So I thought they had got it right at last.

But on Tuesday evening I waited at Mater Dei for the X 1 for two straight hours, arriving in Gozo at 10pm.

And on Friday, since the X 1 would depart from Ċirkewwa in half an hour’s time, I hopped on the Route 11 bus. We left at 8.50am and I arrived in Sliema at 11.10am – that’s 2 hours 20 minutes later.

There was no evident problem – no traffic jams, no bus malfunction, no other incident or accident. Nor did we waste too much time at the Buġibba interchange. It’s just we got there two hours and twenty minutes later.

I can point out some of the reasons but expect Arriva to investigate further and put in corrective measures.

I think it is insane to have this mainline connection from Gozo go round Malta so much. We went to Buġibba, as I explained, then on to the Coast Road, then all around the St Julian’s and Sliema front. What about the people from Gozo who want to get to Valletta as quickly as possible and go to work?

The driver, an irritable Englishman, drove the bendy-bus slowly, at practically walking pace.

Then there are many bus stops that are far too near each other, so every time we left one, we immediately stopped at another.

And, the main cause of the delay, I think, is that people still pay the driver instead of boarding the bus with pre-paid tickets. Unless Arriva does something about this, we will still be complaining about delays. You get people, tourists and Maltese, coming on the bus and only then opening up their handbag, fishing for the purse, opening umpteen zips, counting out the coins, and then engaging in a short conversation with the driver about where they want to go (useless chatter because the prices are the same) and what kind of ticket they want. Arriva must somehow penalize those who board without a ticket if they ever hope to expedite the bus ride. Purchasing the ticket on board the bus must become the exception rather than the norm. Or at least give people who buy their tickets from the machine some sort of incentive.

Even so, the bendy-bus that left Ċirkewwa relatively empty, soon filled up. By the time we got to St Paul’s Bay it was pretty much full up. When we got to Pembroke with hordes of foreign students waiting to board, the driver opened all three doors and flocks of Italian students poured in by the non-paying doors. Arriva seems to be encouraging this sort of non-paying culture, much as one finds abroad.

According to the timetable planned by Arriva for each route, there should have been a time for the bus’s departure from Ċirkewwa and for its arrival at Valletta. Instead of which, after I complained rather loudly, I got a call from a senior Arriva official who wanted to know all the details. I thought that they would know all that and much more just by looking at the time the bus arrived in Valletta. They did not need information from me. They had said they could find out from GPS where each bus was at any moment. They should have somebody checking up on the timings kept, or not kept, and asking direct questions. I accept that Malta’s roads, especially at 10am on summer days, are pretty well clogged up but that is no reason why a journey that used to last an hour and a quarter, now lasts almost three hours. Which boat trip must Gozitans who work in Malta catch to get to work on time?

What I am writing about does not relate solely to the Ċirkewwa to Valletta route. Even as I was talking to the Arriva senior manager, who should have obtained his information from his own system, I passed by the Ferries bus stop where at least 50 people, almost all tourists, were waiting in the sun for buses that did not come. At Mater Dei on Tuesday, a crowd of Maltese grumbled and swore when their buses simply did not turn up. An official from the Office of the Prime Minister, who also had to wait for quite some time for his bus, heard all this.

The more I fume and think about it, the more I understand that the problems are absolutely not related to the non-appearance of bus drivers.

This is a failure not just of Arriva (and very damaging to its international name) but also of the entire policy framework that created the tender that was won by Arriva. That is where the very crux of the matter lies.

Let me go straight to the conceptual basis: this began by establishing the need to radically change the way that Malta’s public transport system had evolved over so many years when there was no evidence that the old system was not liked by the Maltese. It is true that bus patronage has been declining over the past years and that the solution to unclog Malta’s roads lies in encouraging more bus use, but the way it has been implemented seems designed to make bus use more of an exception than the rule. What used to be sneered at and called Valletta-centric may in the end have been the result of trial and error over decades and the best way the Maltese found suited them.

On top of that, in recent years another system set up with Mater Dei and the university as hubs.

The government tender spoke of doing away with all that and creating this confused system of interchanges that the Maltese far and wide are now rejecting and loudly complaining about.

As for Arriva, one must remember that abroad Arriva is in constant competition with trains, undergrounds, and other bus companies. Here it has a monopoly unless one factors in the use of private cars. If things remain the way they are, I can see bus patronage taking an even greater dip and car ownership and use increasing incrementally.

If there is going to be a real change, as opposed to just tinkering with a bad system, Arriva, if not the government itself, should build a model which repeats the two systems as they were pre-3 July, and see if reinstating the direct services to Valletta, Mater Dei and the university make more sense rather than insisting on this chaotic meandering around towns and villages from coast to coast, from north to south.

Whatever the predictions Arriva made when it tendered for the service, if people just refuse to use the service it will land us with more cars on the road, hence more traffic jams, and hence less passengers for Arriva.

People will start using public transport only if it is quick and cheap. I can understand that economies of scale made for this meandering pattern of routes but someone should have pointed out that the time factor was at least equally important as piling them all in a smaller number of buses. One would really like to see the entire bus route system and get the expected timings from it in optimum conditions, see whether that is feasible, and do more than a couple of test runs. Whatever the timing for a Route 11 bus from Ċirkewwa to Valletta was, I think it was never planned it would take almost three hours. Was any difference made between the use of a bendy-bus and a smaller bus?

The system is all wrong and must be changed, whatever the cost either to Arriva or to the government.

Only after the Valletta-centric and Mater Dei and university hubs are reinstated, should Arriva think and slowly experiment with the cross-Malta routes. If this is not done, I predict Arriva will go the way of the train and the tram – be driven into irrelevance and obsolescence.

There was, at the genesis of this disaster, an almost childlike optimistic belief in the triumph of a new, possibly computer-generated, system over the old, tested and tried system the Maltese have used over the past decades. This has been a constant government boast – that by using IT we would be doing everything differently, that by having a new hospital our healthcare would improve no end, and that the new bus system would automatically upgrade us to ‘European standards’. Instead, quite predictably as we now see, the new system has collapsed into chaos and any Maltese one meets considers we are now far worse than we were on 2 July.

There was a strong determination to create something new, completely new. There was a will to do away not just with the old buses that spewed noxious gases into the streets, but also with the old system and possibly, though this was never declared, to do away with all the old operators of the system. I hold no brief for the latter, and quite clearly, the system is now far more comfortable, cleaner and more respectful, but not at the cost of taking more than double the time it used to take to get from Point A to Point B. That part of the equation was never declared.

I find it difficult to believe this system was never tested in real time and in real conditions. Difficult to believe no one at Transport Malta, at the Ministry for Transport, heck even at Cabinet level questioned the conceptual assumptions and warned of pitfalls.

Instead they all contributed, we all contributed, to raising expectations sky-high and as a result all involved have now ended with egg on their faces.

Even if, and when, Arriva gets all the drivers they lack, the system cannot work and be accepted by the Maltese.

The coaches are nice and roomy and air-conditioning is a boon, but this is again a repeat of the Mater Dei saga: the outside conditions are a huge improvement, but the inner system has not improved. On the contrary, it has degenerated. All the hype that accompanied the opening of Mater Dei fizzled out once the kinks in the system kicked in and instead of becoming this government’s best card to command the people’s admiration, it became an albatross round its neck. Even now, years after its opening, it is still good for its hotel comforts but bad as to service especially at the crucial Emergency Department.

The Arriva disaster is even worse: at least at Mater Dei the medical side is functioning and satisfactory. It is practically useless to tinker with the Arriva system. Only a radical rethink can save matters.

But such has been the disgust experienced by the Maltese population this past month, when the promised huge improvement never materialized, when it was said that the disaster on Day One was going to be rectified, here we are a month down the road and it is only marginally better, that in people’s minds it is not Arriva which is mainly to blame, but the government whose hopes to climb back on the opinion stakes hinged so much on Arriva and were so cruelly dumped by bad planning and worse execution.

This is a government that sets much store on its own initiatives, which is rather strange considering that in most other countries the government is measured by how it ‘governs’ rather than from its own initiatives. But there you are: the government has got hoisted by its own petard − what it planned to be its signal contribution has now turned out to be its signal failure.

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PS. As I finished writing this, I got a call (Saturday evening at 7) from the top Arriva official, who I mention in the article, who told me they had identified the driver and will be talking to him on Monday (hurrah) and that they are changing Route 41 as from today and are looking at Route 11 as well.

My comment: past experience over the past month with so many false hopes raised, has made me, and I think many Maltese, deeply sceptical about improvements.