Editorial: Counting passengers, missing reality

A recent parliamentary question revealed that four cases of overcrowding on public buses were found over 16,000 inspections in the first five months of this year. Four!

The year before, there were almost twice as many inspections in the whole year. And only one case of overcrowding found.

It is hard to know where the system is failing. Either inspectors do not actually count how many people are on a particular bus. Or, perhaps, they are relying on the number of passengers shown by the module at the entrance. Or else the total number of standing and seating passengers is a number plucked at random and bears no resemblance to how much space a normal sized person takes up.

Or, maybe, a little of all three.

Not every route has problems or maybe not every service on that route, as you can see from the National Statistics Office transport site. But the comments generated by the story show people’s frustration.

It is hard to reconcile the official passenger limit with the reality of passengers crammed shoulder to shoulder, struggling to reach the exits.

When passengers yell out to the driver that they cannot ‘Move back!’ because there is no space, you have to worry. The reality does not capture how many people slip onto a bus from the exit doors when they see that it is full – either because they do not have the patience to wait to board or because they feel that they stand little chance of finding a place.

For them, especially if they have a Tallinja card, it may seem a minor infringement but it means the driver has no idea how many people are on board. But that cannot be the only problem.

The Malta Public Transport management is well aware of issues, from closed roads and badly-parked cars to the need for smart traffic-lights, which allow buses to go safely against one-way roads, and to the ever-increasing parking slots added to already congested streets and bus-lane enforcement.

Over the last months, the introduction of mass transport was one of the most debated issues.

Would alternative transport wean people off their cars? The then CEO of Transport Malta, Kurt Farrugia, had made a presentation saying 400 additional daily bus services were being added. Surely, this was far from enough.

Let us put some things into perspective: a total of 82 million passengers were carried in 2025, with some 227,000 passengers per day on average in 2025 (a 9.6% increase from 2024, reflecting free Tallinja use).

Of these, nine million were ‘non-personalised’ – for which we can read tourists, with the numbers going up over the summer months.

But there were still only 62 complaints of lack of capacity in 2026 – less than 10% of the total, and 260 in 2025 – representing over 13%. Is this another case of user apathy?

Remember, Malta Public Transport is getting €1 per passenger trip from the government as a subsidy. Before we invest billions on alternative transport, surely we should first improve the public bus system we already have.

Whethere we like it or not, buses remain Malta’s most realistic and important means of reducing traffic in the foreseeable future. But at least let’s acknowledge the fact that too many conwould-be passengers continue using their cars because buses are full up or else do not like the prospect of being packed like sardines.

Whether inspectors are living in an alternative universe, whether drivers are reluctant to leave people at a bus-stop, or people are sneaking on without being counted, something is wrong. For Minister Chris Bonett to claim that inspectors only found four overcrowded buses merely shows how much further Malta needs to go.