Another petition for direct Valletta bus route

A mother of three, fed up with the unreliable bus service to her town, has single-handedly collected 450 signatures petitioning Transport Malta to change the Mġarr-Valletta route after her pleas were ignored.

It took Carmen Bugeja eight days to gather the signatures from neighbours and residents before she presented her petition to Transport Malta and Arriva yesterday.

The current bus service takes passengers from Mġarr to Valletta via Sliema when previously it went straight through Birkirkara, saving a lot of time.

“There was no need for the bus to go through Sliema,” she insists, adding that the service was also irregular.

Mrs Bugeja’s petition is the first to be made by an individual and comes hot on the heels of another in Balzan, whose residents this week started collecting signatures appealing for their own bus to travel directly to Valletta.

And last month Marsascala residents living in Tas-Siberia, the town’s largest residential zone, also started a petition demanding the reinstatement of a direct bus route to Valletta.

Describing the customer care as “nonexistent”, Mrs Bugeja says she phoned Arriva customer care some 40 times since the service started and the last call she made she was promised the routes would change by September 11.

The following day when her daughter got a copy of the route changes and found out that Mġarr had been left out, Mrs Bugeja promised herself that when she finished work that very same day she was going to start collecting signatures. She feels Arriva has taken her for a ride.

She has now heard that at the end of October things will change once again but says this is unacceptable considering that children start school next week and they have been waiting for three months for a decent service, Mrs Bugeja said.