Opinion: ‘The beginning of our plan’

Minister Chris Bonett recently made an earth-shattering announcement – as from Easter Sunday, there would be 25 new buses joining the public transport network through an amazing €6 million investment. Never one to miss an opportunity for self-promotion, Bonett bragged, “This important measure marks the beginning of our plan to offer solutions to the mobility needs of the people”.

It seems nothing had been done in the transport sector until Bonett arrived to save the day.  Labour’s transport plan has only just begun.  So we can breathe easy now, we can put our minds at rest that buses will start arriving when they’re meant to, if they arrive at all, and that they won’t be full and leave you stranded. Sometimes they aren’t even full and still drive past.

Unfortunately for Bonett, the people have got used to ignoring hyped-up announcements about the latest solution to all our problems. They know Bonett’s latest breaking news will be as useless as all the others that came before it.

Anybody who uses public transport knows it’s still unreliable.  You still can’t count on the bus turning up to get you to work on time.  And that’s the simple reason why people cannot just ditch their cars.

Even making public transport free failed to register any significant shifts in private car use. If you offer the Maltese public something for free and they still won’t take it, whatever you’re offering must be pretty rotten.

The Maltese public knows nothing’s really going to change public transport. They’ve been putting up with nonsense for years.  You would think that after eviscerating Arriva, Labour would have fixed the public transport problem.  Not only has Labour not fixed it, but Autobuses de Leon, which now runs our public transport, is costing us almost seven times more than Arriva.

Arriva received an average of €8 million per year in subsidies.  In 2022, Autobuses de Leon received €54 million:  €40 million in subsidies and another €14 million to cover tal-Linja card costs.

Between 2015 and 2022, Autobuses de Leon got €229 million of our money.

In October 2014, Labour transport minister Joe Mizzi announced that Autobuses de Leon would take over the public transport by the beginning of 2015.  Mizzi was asked whether he was confident that Autobuses de Leon could survive on fewer subsidies than Arriva.  With characteristic swagger, Mizzi replied, “Our government will deliver on its promises”.

A quarter of a billion euro later, Mizzi has disappeared.  He was replaced by Aaron Farrugia, who was summarily dismissed for his gross incompetence.  And now we’ve got Chris Bonett.  All three have one thing in common – they all made fantastic promises about our public transport and broke them.

By 20 December 2014, Mizzi was able to announce 8 January 2015 as the day when Autobuses de Leon would take over.  “A copy of the agreement”, he said, “will be tabled in parliament in the coming days”.  On the day of the takeover, Mizzi repeated that “we will table the contract reached with Autobuses de Leon once parliament reconvenes”.

Parliament reconvened four days later.  When then-shadow minister Marthese Portelli asked Mizzi to keep his promise to publish the contract, his response was that “the information requested will be given in another sitting”.  It was – a full 14 months later.

By then, the public transport situation had not improved.  Mizzi was compelled to admit that “the service is not perfect”.  But there was a reason for Labour’s utter failure in the transport sector – “Negativity from the Opposition was not helping this sector to recover”, Mizzi told Parliament.

He said that was why he hadn’t published the contract a year earlier as he’d promised. He did not want “the Opposition to exploit it for its own ends”. Besides, he added, he had delayed the publication ”until the people were able to understand how the service was being improved”.

The people couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. They had seen no improvement. But Mizzi had another excuse: “Someone was organising a group of people to create problems, such as taking buses out of service when they shouldn’t have.”

Mizzi was hysterical.  He staunchly defended Autobuses de Leon, with whom he had personally negotiated in Spain. He insisted that buses were arriving more frequently and that “complaints were limited to local areas”.  He claimed that “the majority of complaints related to punctuality”.

Who needs punctuality in a bus service?  “Use of public transport is at an all-time high,” he bragged.  The truth was revealed in a Maltatoday survey that showed that 75% of the public felt that the service had actually deteriorated.  That survey showed that concern about public transport was at its highest since 2013, when Arriva was still around.

But Mizzi had an amazing excuse:  “The survey was carried out too soon after routes were introduced and while the system was still finding its feet… I recommend that you conduct a survey when the changes are complete”.

Another survey was conducted by the Association of Consumer Rights in 2023.  You’d think by then the changes were complete and the system had found its feet.  That survey showed that 50% of the Maltese public hardly ever use the public transport system.  Worse still, 70% were still not willing to use the public service even though it’s free.

Ten years after Labour signed that contract with Autobuses de Leon, the country has spent €350 million on public transport.

Annual subsidies for the Spanish company are almost seven times higher than Arriva’s. Buses still turn up late, full, or simply don’t turn up at all. After a decade of empty promises, Bonett has hilariously announced “the beginning of our plan”.