Transport Malta is “quite confident” that the number of yearly public transport passengers will start to increase again as of 2022, a Transport Malta spokesperson told The Malta Independent.
The Covid-19 pandemic has had a clear impact on the use of public transport. Statistics show that the total number of passengers using public transport between 2015 and 2019 was on a constant rise. In 2015, 42,160,228 passengers used public transport, rising to 57,409,385 in 2019.
In 2020, the year Covid-19 reached Malta, the numbers dropped to 33,776,664.
21,253,632 passengers used public transport between January and August 2021, a Transport Malta spokesperson told The Malta Independent.
Asked about the drop witnessed in 2020, and to confirm that this was mainly due to the pandemic, a spokesperson for Transport Malta said: “The drop in the number of passenger trips is completely attributable to the Pandemic. There were whole cohorts of passengers who stopped using the service practically all together. These include Students who were getting their tuition online and therefore did not need to travel to their educational institutions, tourists and workers who where working from home, amongst others.”
“This is also affirmed when one considers that the first two months of 2020 had continued to show an increase in the number of passengers carried of 21%. The downward trend started in March. During this period Government took every measure possible in order to prevent the spread of the virus when one uses the bus.”
Asked for their prediction for the rest of 2021, the spokesperson said: “if one was to compare the period between March and August last year to that of this year, one notes an 18.7% increase. However, given that the first two months of last year were quite strong, we expect that this year we will be within the same levels of passengers carried as last year.”
Asked how the government intends to get the passenger numbers to increase again, the spokesperson said that the government “strongly believes that public transport is part of the solution when it comes to decreasing the carbon footprint and to decreasing the number of cars on our roads.”
The spokesperson said that it supports the use of the public transport service in a number of ways, such as: by offering free public transport to persons between the ages of 14 and 20, students 21 years and over, persons with disability and persons over the age of 70; through the improvement in infrastructure in order to make journey times faster and the upgrading of waiting areas; the introduction of new services intended to meet passengers needs, such as the recently introduced services between the fast ferry landing in Lascaris Wharf and University, Mater Dei Hospital, Junior Collage and MCAST (Paola).
“Government intends to continue with these initiatives and introduce new ones in order to encourage those bus users who may have stopped using the service during the pandemic, to return to the service whist encouraging new persons to start using the service. We are quite confident that the number of yearly passengers will start to increase again as of 2022.”