Arriva is now operating a vastly improved bus service but passengers need to be aware that the company is operating routes and a service it did not design and Transport Malta is responsible for sanctioning route changes, the Arriva Malta managing director said.

Maximum waiting times may be reviewed

Keith Bastow also admitted the contracted maximum waiting times may have to be reviewed on certain routes.

“Performance has vastly improved and where we are today bears no resemblance to where we were. We are now offering a full Monday to Friday level of service,” Mr Bastow told The Sunday Times.

“If complaints are about where people want to travel to and from, these are route-related issues that are under the jurisdiction of the regulator Transport Malta, primarily,” he added.

A ‘Monday to Friday level of service’ is the full weekday timetable as the operator had been forced to temporarily replace some weekday services with less frequent Sunday services after its chaotic launch due to a shortage of drivers.

The company self-imposed a deadline of September 11 for the provision of a full service after its July 3 launch was marred by complaints about long waiting times, longer journeys and faulty buses, ticketing machines and information display equipment.

Arriva blamed the delays on around 180 drivers who failed to show up for work after professing complaints about their shift patterns, although the no-show drivers were later accused of sabotage by a Transport Ministry official after it emerged many of them were drivers Arriva had been contractually forced to retain from the old system.

However, complaints persist about buses not running to their timetables on certain routes and some routes remain unpopular with commuters either because they claim bus stops are too far away from their homes or because the routes – designed by Transport Malta with the assistance of consultants – are too long.

Two sets of route changes have already been announced and Transport Malta is currently working on two further phases of route changes based on passenger feedback in consultation with Arriva. These will be announced on October 2 and October 30.

“Hopefully a large number of issues passed on to Transport Malta by us and issues that arose in their consultations with local councils will be addressed by October 30,” Mr Bastow said.

Since some routes have already been changed, Arriva said the best place to find the latest timetables was on the Arriva website www.arriva.com.mt.

Arriva is contractually obliged to ensure commuters do not wait longer than the maximum waiting times, which vary from 10 minutes to an hour depending on the route.

“After implementing the four phases of service changes devised by Transport Malta, around half of the original routes will have been altered. At that stage, with that level of change, we will have to sit down with the client body (Transport Malta) and have a review to make sure those maximum waiting times are still pertinent,” Mr Bastow said.

He pointed out that Arriva has taken action on notoriously busy or congested routes by adding more vehicles but he acknowledged problems persisted on “three or four” routes and more action was needed.

Congestion on local roads is a real challenge for the bus service, Mr Bastow said, as traffic accidents can cause long tailbacks that can clog up the network and these are impossible to predict.

Last Wednesday, The Times reported that the government believed Arriva was breaching parts of its contract but penalties could only be imposed from November.

Mr Bastow responded: “We had an agreed action plan with the Transport Ministry and we have delivered to that plan.

“There may be some minor areas where the ministry may think we’re not meeting our contractual requirements, but I think the government realised that such a transformational change needed to time to bed down. That is why there is a period where the penalty regime does not apply.”

He added that the real-time information system that notifies passengers at certain bus stops about when the next bus will be arriving had suffered technical problems but it will be switched on and working properly in the “very very near future”.

He also admitted to having “practical concerns” about implementing the government-imposed system of charging Malta ID card holders discounted fares because of delays caused by drivers checking ID cards.

“It would be nice to avoid that but it is a system we inherited and understand. If the structure has to change we will contribute our opinion to what different fare products we could look at. But across all the countries we operate in we are very much in favour of giving discounts for regular travel,” he said.