Some new route buses are not being used, study finds

Some of the new buses bought recently, their price heavily subsidised by the government, have not been used on the scheduled bus service, a five-month study by the Malta Transport Authority shows.

Bus owners were given Lm32,000 in government assistance for every new bus under a Lm4.7 million fleet replacement scheme. The new buses cost around Lm45,000 each.

The exercise showed that some of the 133 new buses were not used on scheduled routes or had not been used for as long as four months, a spokesman for the Urban Development and Roads Ministry said.

The study was carried out with the aim of determining the number of buses needed to run the service once current inefficiencies were rooted out.

The spokesman said that at present, most buses run on a day-in-day-out basis. The vehicles are used for unscheduled work - such as taking children to and from school - during the day when they are not being used for scheduled work.

However, he continued, the study showed that a number of buses had never been used on the scheduled service or used on very few occasions.

He said this "anomaly" would be addressed in a new agreement between the government and the Public Transport Association, which is being drawn up. Discussions on this agreement have been ongoing for some months.

"Such a situation is unacceptable and the government will be including a clause reserving the right to ask for the return of the vehicle in question if it transpires that it has not been used on the scheduled bus service for an extended period of time," he said. Asked to quantify the time frame in question, the spokesman said this was still to be defined.

The spokesman said that during the negotiations the government had asked the association to introduce disciplinary measures to honour commitments it had entered into in the past, including the requirement of drivers to wear uniforms and a total ban on smoking. He said this was an addition to the introduction of methods to make sure that only diesel fuel was used to run the buses, and that bus owners provided receipts for any costs they claimed, which are in turn subsidised by the government.

A radical overhaul of the system is being discussed between the association, which represents the bus owners, and the authority, the spokesman said. This included a point raised by the report stating that the number of buses could be reduced for the scheduled bus service to run efficiently.