Speaking in the debate on Xarabank last Friday, Prime Minister Gonzi finally admitted what everybody else knows – that the Arriva service is not there yet.

To date, neither he nor Minister Austin Gatt have not taken up the challenge made by this paper months ago, for them to go on unannounced, private, trips on an Arriva bus, wait at a bus stop like everybody else, see whether they keep to the timetables set up at each bus stop, monitor the quality of the service, see whether they get to their destination on time, etc.

The fact that they have not taken up the challenge means a lot. It’s not that they are scared of the reactions of fellow travellers. They, Minister Gatt especially, milked every occasion they could to pose for photos in the new buses only to drop the new baby the moment it was born and revealed itself as less than perfect.

The issue of Arriva is a complicated one. It is a private service but the government intended to use it to boast about its miracle-making abilities. So when things go wrong, the government tries to point fingers at the service and tells us it is a private service; but then it sort of remains fully committed to its success and its lack of making it is a bad mark on this government’s record. Hence the prime minister’s words last Friday.

There was a time when the government actually boasted about the amount of fines it levied on the company for non-compliance with the tender. Since then, we have heard nothing more. And, frankly, since then, the service has not improved.

To list the faults would take the entire paper. Suffice it to list the clear commitments that were made and which have not been implemented:

We, the public, were promised an SMS service (to enter into service last July) which tells a commuter on a bus stop at what time to expect the next bus. That never materialised.

One huge complaint regards ... complaints. There is a customer care service of sorts to which people call, only to be told the complaint is being taken care of. But Arriva never comes back to the complainant and tells him what action has been taken.

The quality of the buses themselves is deteriorating. Most show signs of collisions and this, in turn, shows a bad level of drivers. We all know that driving on Malta’s roads is difficult but no company would tolerate having a fleet of buses with so many accidents on record.

The cherry on the cake is the recent accident at Portes des Bombes. An accident, is an accident; is an accident. The gradient of that stretch is very dangerous, especially when the roasd is slippery. Yet hundreds of trucks, concrete mixers, etc pass through and not one has ever skidded into the Portes. Arriva said they would be investigating, but no result has been made public.

The frequent accidents, the multiple breakdowns and the sight of so many buses being towed away all point to the slipshod way in which the drivers have been recruited, trained and are managed. Maybe it is just an impression, but that is what you get when you are pressed to have the service up and running, when half your workforce has let you down and when you push people into driving big, huge buses with next to no training or no proper training at all. For all the middle management getting into complicated tangles and wasting people’s times over mysterious paperwork, the system is not working.

Nor, and this is perhaps the main complaint, is it all that different from the past system. Mainly, it is still a service with no smile, the drivers exhibit no real courtesy with passengers and they have not been trained, nor do they seem monitored.

On second thoughts, neither the prime minister nor Dr Gatt should be welcome on an Arriva bus right now. They should have done so in the dark days of summer 2011 when people waited for hours on a badly-designed service when no buses turned up. Instead, the two ministers jetted around in their Jaguars and people wilted in the sun. No, they are not welcome now.