The weekend papers were full of articles telling in greater or less details how the public transport reform led by Minister Joe Mizzi is not working.

Things have come to the point that people are asking which was the worst reform in public transport – the PN Arriva effort or the PL MPT one?

Does it really matter which one got it wrong? It would seem that whenever politicians try to take over public transport they invariably get it wrong.

Or else that the pre-Arriva public transport, if that deserved the name, exactly reflected the real state of public transport in Malta – a shambles as to ownership, a shambles as to operation, a shambles as to delivery of a service.

There are few services in this country which so affect the totality of citizens and visitors alike as public transport. Yet the country under one configuration or the other, never seems to get it right.

When Arriva came along, people enjoyed the new company’s discomfiture when half the workforce did not turn up on Day One. People enjoyed complaining about the tortuous routes created, and most of all when the bendy-buses started catching fire one after the other.

Now Arriva is long gone and the new service should have been running like an efficient machine. Instead, it’s not. The fare has been increased, so has the subsidy, there are many more routes, and people are recruited every day, yet the service, according to most people on the streets, has deteriorated even from the bad old Arriva times.

The Arriva reform was the one that broke the stranglehold of the previous non-system. Instead of multiple owners, there is now one owner. Instead of the old ramshackle buses, there are now new, air-conditioned buses which are far more comfortable. It was hard work to dislodge the idea that the owner-drivers owned the system rather than the customers.

Arriva battled hard at the disappointments: employees not turning up, employees cutting corners, trips not done, discipline proving too difficult to impose and above all a subsidy that proved to be unsustainable.

All this has now been changed but people are still unhappy. The service is still unreliable, and Minister Mizzi himself has admitted many drivers do the Sorry Not On Service trick in the late hours and get away with it because they are not properly monitored except for being tracked.

There’s worse: anyone who complains is told his complaint will be passed on but there is no feedback since no record of the complaint is kept. And you don’t know if the person at the other end just threw away the complaint or even whether he wrote anything down.

Basically, anytime that public transport gets debated in Parliament you can be sure Minister Mizzi will be haranguing the House with a bunch of non-sequiturs and the Opposition MPs lose the argument because they focus on minor issues.

Does it take too much to put together a reliable system that works and delivers? We are sure that if the service was given, really given not given and then taken back, to the private sector, in other words without political interference, it would work and be more efficient.

What has changed from the Arriva times to these times is that political interference has grown and grown and it is this which has led to the growing inefficiency of the system.

This government, which was elected also on the widespread protests about Arriva, artfully contrived, moved in to run the service, first temporarily and later in a more direct way. That is Labour’s way – for ministers to do everything themselves. It did not work in other times, nor will it work now.