With the summer heat on, how efficient is the new bus service to get to the beach? Kristina Chetcuti caught the bus from Valletta to Għadira, only to find out that a trip to the beach took as long as a flight to London!
First there was the little problem of finding the right bay at the Valletta terminus for the bus to Għadira. There seemed to be two alternatives, according to conflicting advice from Arriva assistants: bus 41 from bay 7 or bus 11 from bay 1. None of the options are a direct service but the buses drive via an array of other towns.
The digital boards were not working. Arriva information assistants or, indeed, anyone wearing the highlighted yellow jacket, were practically mobbed for information. The buses were not running on schedule. At 10.45 a.m. I was told by a bus inspector that, yes, a bus to Għadira will come but “I can’t tell you the time it will get here”.
I was still waiting at the bus bay at noon, as the sweltering summer heat was driving people’s temperatures up. Any semblance of queue was long lost – jostling and elbowing were the order of the day. Waiting commuters – some claiming three hour-waits – were banging on the doors of buses which drove into the bays, shouting at the hapless drivers to open the doors to drive them to their destination.
“I think by the end of this day we’re all going to need a dose of Valium,” one driver said. A man on his stalled bus refused to get off the vehicle. “I’ll have a heart attack if I stay in the sun any longer,” the elderly man kept hollering.
A few minutes to noon, there was a rush from the crowd waiting with bulky beach bags. In the end, it was neither bus 41 nor bus 11 – instead we had to hop on bus X1, a bendy bus. Some 140 passengers filled up this equivalent of three buses. It was so chock-a-block that the air conditioning could barely be felt.
Within 15 minutes the bus had slowly snaked its way to Gżira. There, it stalled for 20 minutes as the bus doors would not close properly and the engine registered a fault. Half the passengers got off, tut-tutting that the old adage “b’tal-linja jaqbillek” (it pays to catch the bus) was not valid anymore; “bil-mixi jaqbillek,” (it pays to walk) they cried. Others wished the old yellow buses back: “Better the devil we knew,” they said.
The passengers who remained on board offered suggestions to the calm driver: “Do you want us to get out and push the thing?” They offered him solace: “Don’t worry, every new beginning is tough.”
The driver was eventually given instructions over the phone on how to restart the engine. The bus started off to a round of applause.
“It’s a good thing he’s not a driver of the old buses. Can you imagine the swearing? He’d be smashing the whole thing down,” laughed a woman. The sense of camaraderie between the commuters was fast growing.
Tales of bus woes kept being regaled. One woman, Julia Borg, from Siġġiewi, said she had left her house at 9 a.m.: “I’ve done more than four hours commuting so far.”
“Well, all Maltese are going to lose weight thanks to Arriva. With all this travelling to get from one place to another we won’t even have time to eat at all,” another one replied. But she was soon proved wrong as beachgoers opened their packed lunches and started snacking on the bus.
The bus trailed slowly, greeted at each stop by swarming red-faced crowds. At a bus stop in St Julians scores of waiting commuters stormed onto the bus squashing passengers against the bus glass panes. The driver asked them politely to go down as his bus was full. A heated argument ensued, with some claiming they had been waiting for more than three hours. One of them started blaspheming at the driver.
A few commuters started praying: “Sweet Jesus, give us the grace to get to the beach safe and sound.”
The soft spoken driver, in his 50s, kept his calm: “This morning feels just like three never ending days,” he said.
A 2 p.m. we had only reached St Paul’s Bay. The driver estimated another hour at least to get to Għadira.
That’s a total of three hours to get to the beach – the same time to fly to London.