Arriva! Arriva!

Within less than a month, Arriva will start operating on our small islands.  They have sent brochures and created a site/journey planner for us Maltese to help understand the new system better.  Well, from what I could get it is a recipe for disaster!

1. The fares - they are too expensive to begin with, when one takes into account the average income of a Maltese worker. For about 1.3 Euro 2-hour ticket, when compared to an average price of 47 - 58 cents for an average trip it's quiet expensive, if one is going to stay longer than two hours at their desired place.  The day ticket is a very good buy and also the saver cards.  
2. Saver cards - I am personally looking forward for the saver cards as I hate it that every time I have to search in my purse to pay the fare, in fact my purse is now heavy not because I have a lot of money (I wish) but because I have loads of 1 and 2 euro cents!  However, I find that the saver cards programme needs improvement, firstly from what I could understand (please feel free to correct me) if is Maltese and has a saver card on Malta it cannot be used in Gozo and it applies the same vice-versa; which I personally feel it is stupid especially when taking into account Gozitan workers/students/users who commute frequently to Malta would either have to buy a separate card or a ticket since one cannot use their card.  Also these cards cannot be used at night, so again if one decides to go out the card is useless to have to cough up the money; while in England the Oyster card (which is more or less the British equivalent to our new Arriva saver Cards) don't make such distinction at all!
3. The routes -  the direct routes from several areas in Malta to Mater Dei/University, have been removed, which I find it is an idiotic move from Arriva's part.  If these routes weren't used so frequently I would understand Arriva's decision to remove them, but it isn't the case!  These routes are usually the one's which end up with people standing up due to being used by a lot of people!  Also certain routes have now become longer, such as the one from Valletta to Cirkewwa, which now is going to pass through Bugibba, so that's an extra 15 minutes on the trip at least.  Also many villages according to people's comments seem to be excluded from Arriva's timetables, so it isn't that much of a good news.Also those routes which were left as they were seem to be much more infrequent, then they used to now.

So, my prediction, it doesn't look good.  My main concern is with the routes, Arriva in their brochure advertised that it added a lot of new routes, when in reality it remove a lot of important routes and made such trips more infrequent, which will lead to a lot of people standing up on buses due to resulting in a lot of people waiting to catch the same bus, due to lack of different routes.  The current routes, from my experience, were perfect for the needs of the public, the only thing which they needed was to be more frequent and be punctual.   Arriva, in my opinion, hasn't clearly tried to understand the actual needs of the Maltese consumer and didn't carry out any proper analysis of our current situation otherwise they wouldn't have come up with such stupid routes!  The system may have worked for the English or in other European states, but it won't work here.

The current system isn't that bad, if only our government bothered to train our bus drivers properly and provide with newer air-conditioned buses and more frequent routes, we would have a purely LOCAL bus service to be proud of and we wouldn't have needed a foreign company to interfere in something where they clearly didn't carry out enough research!