The latest Eurostat survey on public transport use pens a tale of two public transport services. 

The survey found that in 2024, 58% of people in Malta did not use any public transport whatsoever. This is the eighth highest frequency for people in any EU country to never use public transport, despite Malta effectively making its Tallinja service free in October 2022.

This Eurostat data found that in 2024, 10.3% of people in Malta used public transport on a daily basis, 9.1% used public transport on at least a weekly basis, 7.3% claimed to use it on a monthly basis, 15.4% said they utilise public transport services less than once a month, and nearly six in every ten (58.0%) said they "never" used it.

Malta and Luxembourg are the only EU countries to offer free public transport to all residents on a national scale. While Malta effectively offers free bus services through the distributed Tallinja cards, Luxembourg, in April 2020, opted to make all bus, tram, and train services within the country free, without a card system, for all its residents and tourists - with the exception of first-class train passengers.

This Eurostat data ranks Luxembourg as the EU country with the highest share of its people using public transport every week (23.1%), and the EU Member State with the lowest proportion of its people stating that they never used public transport services throughout 2024, (15.7%).

We have two different pictures painted here.  In both Malta and Luxembourg, public transport is free.  That is a measure designed to encourage more people to ditch their cars and use public transport to get around.

In Luxembourg, it evidently works as the country tops the European Union rankings.  But in Malta, it does not appear like the measure has had the same effect.  Malta lags far behind not just Luxembourg, but is also down on the EU median in this regard, despite the government's investment in making public transport free.

This isn't necessarily a sign that making public transport free has been a failure in and of itself - it has surely had a positive impact, but it certainly goes to show that measures simply placed in isolation do not work.

A bus - whether free or not - ultimately must sit in the same traffic that a car must sit in.  This is the greatest flaw in the grand plan to rely on Malta's public bus service - and the country's road infrastructure does nothing to alleviate it.

We can discuss mass transport systems such as undergrounds or trackless trams or whatever else, but the fact of the matter is that these are measures which are only feasible in the distant future. 

We need short term solutions to improve the public transport service that we have now to make it more efficient and more appealing, because it's clear that simply making it free has not had the desired impact.