A few days ago I was challenged: “You have written so much against Arriva. Now go and see whether the service has improved and if so have the courage to tell the readers.”

Now that, to my mind, is very patronizing. And even so, what if Arriva’s service has improved? The fact is no one, neither the Maltese, nor our visitors, are likely to forget the terrible hours they were made to wait in the sun for a service that just wasn’t anywhere near being acceptable, the long hours to get anywhere, the innumerable detours and the traffic jams as the huge buses proved to be too wide for our roads. The way the service (or should I say disservice) was introduced is a great shame that cannot be erased away. To say that the service today is ‘acceptable’ in no way excuses the shabby way it was introduced. Maybe the fault then was the bus drivers playing truant but it was also because the system was introduced in a completely crazy way, so much so it had to be completely changed months later.

So six months after the service began, here is a potted analysis of the Arriva service now. It does not pretend to be an exhaustive study, something which requires far more time and effort to complete.

Six months into the service, Arriva has now fully become part of the Maltese scene. You can still find people who have not tried it once. Some may be holding off for partisan reasons, others for elitist reasons. The negative sheen of the first six months has yet to be cleaned off: people are still generally unenthusiastic about it, but they have adapted and use the service now. I notice far more Maltese using it today than I remember Maltese using the yellow and red buses before July.

But there are still many things that need to be fixed. The fact that the buses are now (almost) regular should not be interpreted as saying that the service is acceptable.

There are still gaps between what was promised and what has been delivered. You may have to wait for almost half an hour on the bus stop and then two buses bearing the same number come along. I can still not understand why this happens.

I still see an extraordinary number of buses passing by completely empty or with just one or two passengers. To me, that looks like someone somewhere miscalculated or else that people have simply not accepted what the new service has to offer. A case in point are the regional buses, which in some places go round the localities and pick up passengers to feed in to the mainline services. I have still to see them picking up.

On the other hand, the service is dirt-cheap and one of the best bargains to be had.

The drivers are a mix – you have to take your luck. Some are really nice and gentle. The other day a giant of a driver coaxed his overfull bus gently round corners in drizzling rain and earned everyone’s praise. Other drivers are not gentle at all: no sooner have people boarded and paid that the drivers zoom off, accelerating rapidly, braking at corners, and any passenger who has still not made it to a seat risks being thrown around.

I have noticed drivers on their mobile, one with a small radio keeping him company, and there is an increasing tendency for some of them to forget to change the notice announcing their destination. Many times one actually has to ask the drivers for their destination, as this may be completely different from the one on the bus front. On many buses the rather tedious voice announcing the coming bus stop, together with the written announcement, either have not been installed or are somehow switched off. One gets the impression the latter is the case because on some buses the system is working then suddenly it isn’t.

But my worst bone of contention lies with the interchanges. Take Mater Dei, for instance: people, especially the old and frail visiting a sick relative, would have just come out of an overheated hospital environment only to face biting winds and a too small shelter for the many people there, especially now that more routes go to Mater Dei. Why was the hospital built without its own proper and underground bus link?

I cannot understand why just before they get to Valletta, the buses stop and a new driver boards the bus. They then waste more minutes while the old driver collects his things and the money and the new driver to settle into his seat, adjust the other things around him and finally drive on … many times to be stopped by that red traffic light they installed at the Independence monument corner.

But the worst is at interchanges such as the one at Marsa Park & Ride, with all those Arriva and Transport Malta people milling around, doing pretty well nothing except stop the buses for inspectors to examine everyone’s tickets, change the drivers, and so on.

And why do the many Arriva personnel at Sliema Ferries and Valletta not encourage people to purchase their tickets from the machines so as not to waste people’s time buying their ticket from the driver, instead of looking officious and totting down the time of arrival on their clapboard?

The Valletta terminus is still unfinished with the kiosks that had to be ready by July only being finished now, with the temporary white tents still around and of course with the buses disgorging passengers around the Tritons’ fountain instead of at Il-Biskuttin. That was real progress that has been reversed.

Some drivers need weeding out: some are clearly overwhelmed by their task. One was swearing his head off and talking to no one in particular because the slippery road made him late and he feared he would be fined.

But on the whole, this new generation of drivers, male and female, are a far better lot than the previous owner-drivers. I still cannot understand, however, that for all the new jobs that Arriva has provided, the number of people registering for work has remained more or less the same over the past months.

There are still things that were promised that are yet to be in place. The new electronic boards by some bus stops do say they are at a trial stage but it seems we still have some time to wait for the promise to be fulfilled that one can send an SMS and get a reply to know when your bus is coming. I am still uncertain too whether the times displayed tell you when the bus ‘should’ be coming or whether it will actually come.

I notice that many students seem to have purchased a weekly ticket with which they just touch something on the driver’s console. They seem to have taken to the new system and accepted it. It is usually the older persons who seem to grumble that things were better before – or else it may be the result of so many negative stories on TV. Still, you get people who say they had to leave, for instance, Siġġiewi, at around 7am to get to their appointment at Mater Dei, changing buses in the process, and after spending a very short time at the hospital, here they are at the Marsa P&R waiting for what seems forever to get a bus back to their town.

This list of petty complaints and so many others is not an exhaustive and real assessment of the Arriva changeover. Others point out that the government is actually saving money from the huge subsidy it used to give the owner-drivers to the subsidy it gives to Arriva now.

But that’s not the point of the reform, is it? The public transport reform was not a way for the government to save money, or at least it was not the primary intention.

To my way of seeing it, the reform raises the important issue of what a government should do in its term and promise for the next term if elected.

Soon, very soon, we shall start hearing both parties making promises to the electorate. Some commitments are just vote-collecting tactics which no party will ever think of honouring. For many years, we had been promised the reform of the public transport but it was always classed among this kind of promises – those that surface at every election and never honoured.

Until Austin Gatt came and decided to implement the promise. Now that it has happened, even if it happened in the topsy-turvy way we know it happened, the real question to ask is whether it has been worthwhile, or whether the government should have chosen some other task. After all, as I will be saying in the coming weeks, there are other areas where reform is direly needed and where the government has been prominent by its inaction.

To answer this question one has to ask whether today one can really visualize Malta still with the boneshakers we had till July, Arriva troubles, delays, complaints notwithstanding. The answer, which I expect is unanimous, is a resounding No. No one seriously today wants to go back to that system.

Of course, one can also ask if the money spent on this reform could have been spent to alleviate people’s money concerns, or as Joe Muscat always says, to cut down on electricity bills, just as one could possibly say with the money being spent on the Renzo Piano City Gate project or the Barrakka Lift.

Politics is always the art of matching limited possibilities to the many needs. It is a fact that people today are stretched and that the ministers’ €500 a week self-given rise has created an ugly situation. To focus on electricity rates risks deluding people that they can cut down on their bills at the ballot box and there are serious macro-economic questions whether a giveaway will actually make the people’s condition better since at best it will contribute to a splurge of consumer spending, which will peter out of the country in no time at all and leave us in a worst state in the end.

This government, like the one before it, was elected on a general promise that membership of the EU would improve our standard of living. The new public transport system, with its eco-friendly, wide and comfortable buses, and civilized drivers, is a definite improvement on what came before it. But just as a new, state-of-the-art hospital is a definite improvement, it does not, on its own, guarantee there will be state-of-the-art healthcare with no queues for surgical procedures at all, so too an improved public transport system does not automatically guarantee an improved standard of living.

The real challenges lie elsewhere, which is where the two parties are called to come up with real proposals they intend to really deliver.

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