No time to waste

Transport minister Jesmond Mugliett does not ride buses, and will not be losing any sleep over driving into Valletta with his government car and leaving the taxpayer to pick up the bill. It’s called setting the example, but not the good one.

We are all busy people. Not everyone maybe. Of course, there is a difference between the fixed location worker and those other workers, professionals, and self-employed who have to spend the greater part of the day commuting from one place to the other. But as workers of the world, we are all entitled to a precious sense of being busy individuals trying to attempt to earn a living. Our time is money.
Minister Jesmond Mugliett might have a rethink about this one. As probably all ministers are now. Now it looks like the time of our cabinet ministers is necessarily more precious than ours, but it’s like… well… Okay. Let Mugliett spell it out for you: “What would you as a citizen rather see me doing as a minister – would you not rather see me using my time more effectively by getting to places by car faster?” he tells me about choosing between a Mercedes diesel engine and the venerable Maltese public transport system.
At least the man is honest. Excruciatingly so. Here is a member of the cabinet who believes no worker in his right mind should have the luxury of coming to Valletta by car, and that the Maltese employee should emulate the industrious European bees who cycle or catch a bus into the city centre to work. This option is however not on for the Minister for Urban Development and Transport, who knows that his time is precious, and that he needs that diesel engine at his beck and call to make this country a better one. Not quite like Livingstone catching the tube following London’s greatest terrorist attack.
This is the man whose last bus ride was back in September, on the annual watch-a-minister-playing-citizen day when Valletta and a number of streets in the Maltese villages ban the passage of cars. Car-free day is supposed to make us stop and think of how we can improve our environment by using our cars less. It doesn’t work. Even the ministers are grateful it only happens once a year.
Always generous in chutzpah and aplomb, on Tuesday four ministers and a parliamentary secretary presented a park-and-ride solution for the Valletta parking conundrum. It means you leave your car outside of the capital and bus it the rest of the way. “Here is the irony,” their report so pontificated. “75 per cent of those who work come with their private cars while 70 per cent of visitors come on buses. In which other country do you go for work in the centre of the capital city with your car and park there for eight hours? Only in Malta.”
Now, if you want to park in Valletta, the maximum fee will be Lm2.40 a day – ministers will keep on parking their cars in the capital, and will gladly pay the parking fee. Take 20 working days for every month, and it’s the grand total of Lm546 for every minister, all paid by you the taxpayer.
So I ask Mugliett, will he be riding a couple of buses to work, save Valletta from the inconvenience of his employment as transport minister rushing to work every day, inspecting for himself the state of the public transport service whilst he’s at it?
“Look, a minister will have many appointments and other matters to take care of instantly. If I need to go somewhere very quickly, what can I do? Can I just stay waiting for the public transport? I know I could be using the public transport a bit more frequently. But no, I don’t use it. The last time I used the public transport was on car-free day. But a minister will need to travel from one place to the other fast. I make ten phone calls in the car, finding that time very useful as well. And what would you as a citizen rather see me doing as a minister – would you not rather see me using my time more effectively by getting to places by car faster? It would mean spending more time commuting when I could be using my time more effectively.”
Don’t crumple up the page in a fit of anger… at least, Mugliett is honest – he doesn’t ride buses, and he admits the service still needs an overhaul (nine months after being last interviewed by this newspaper), and that he needs his car to get him from A to B – but yes, George Orwell was indeed right… some animals really are. Maybe both him and some other minister can start car pooling on their way to Valletta – either way they don’t need to share the fuel bill. The taxpayer pays it.
“I remember that film in which Michael Douglas is a top executive official who goes to work by tram and the subway. It shows using public transport as being ‘in’. In Malta, that is not the case. We hope that public transport, not just buses but even other means such as lifts in Valletta, can be modernised and encourage a greater use of the public transport. And there are already commuters who use the ferry to come to Valletta.”
So the public transport in Malta still fails to capture the imagination of those CEOs who like Michael Douglas fancy themselves chugging through Manhattan, this time hanging on to a leather strap in the sweltering heat of a relic on wheels. Problem time for Mugliett, who finds himself trying to justify why his park-and-ride system will be improving the public transport system.
“If they want,” he refers to the agreeable cohort of the Maltese bus driver, “it’s in their hands and I will try to push them in that direction. There will obviously be less cars going to Valletta so the roads going into Valletta will be somewhat quieter. One of the operators’ concerns is that they cannot increase buses on routes because of a problem of capacity during peak times. So this can be an opportunity to increase more trips during these times, because traffic into Valletta will be reduced.”
Convinced? I’ll wait for the park-and-ride before harvesting any conclusions. Until now, it is an age-old complaint that the Maltese public transport system, faltering in certain areas but nonetheless reliable in others, still has space to improve.
“I think there is need for a substantial overhaul. Basically there is a need to revise certain routes and study them in depth. It makes sense to use the new low-floor buses in the busiest routes, but that’s a mentality which does not yet exist. For example, there is need to have certain buses on dedicated routes with the same drivers operating it all the time.
“That the public is not satisfied with the service is something that is true since we do get regular complaints. But they are just a small part of the 31 million users every year of our public transport service. I think there are still some defects in the service.”
One of them is the fact that improving public transport is costing money unnaturally. Take the bus ticketing machines, just part of the penumbra of greater scandals which have haunted past Nationalist cabinets. The company which supplied the machines, Alberta, is the same company which services the machines. And the level of breakdowns these machines incur? Anything between five to twelve breakdowns every single day. Hardly a ticket of reliability.
“Yes I know that the system often fails. What the ADT is doing is trying to beef up the IT department to be on top of this problem,” Mugliett says, although he has hardly anything to do with the introduction of the bus ticketing machine.
It was supposed to curb abuses but instead, barely four months old, it yielded a Lm160,000 drop in revenue, believed to have been committed by drivers and passengers. It is a case of alleged fraud which Mugliett says was never proven. Even the president of the Public Transport Association was appreciatively honest in his valuation of the machines – ‘stop the abuse or scrap the system’.
“But the bus-ticketing machines have enabled a real system of accountability, despite some hiccups at the start when they were first installed,” Mugliett says. “Where there have been cases of alleged fraud, these were investigated but there was no evidence of any fraud. Today we can also confirm certain patterns of common usage and main routes of public transport through the machines.
This accountability is important because government has a system of guaranteed earnings for bus drivers. The government makes good for the difference in revenue and expenses when these are not enough to cover all costs. If we don’t have a reported system of how much has been really earned, the government risks being swindled out of this money.”
Bus drivers in fact deliver an essential service of which their revenue still cannot sustain. The machines are making it possible to calculate the exact revenue. Last year income was some Lm5 million for the 508-strong cohort of buses. If operators spent more in expenses – salaries, fuel, insurance – they will get their money back from the state. They got some Lm2 million last year. This time they want guaranteed earnings of some Lm15,000, a massive increase from last year’s claim. The government is ready to give them Lm14,750 per bus.
But Mugliett says there are agreements on reviewing everything from the route network, the number of buses on the routes, and how the system will be operated. “We would like to go beyond a perception that the ADT might be biased against the public transport association. In order not to have this problem, our offers are going to be based on these studies, on proper research on the public transport service. We will come up with an offer and we will give them three months to come to a form of agreement. If we don’t come to an agreement within three months, the ADT might consider that the public transport association does not remain the sole operator of public transport. Our offer will be presented to the association in the next few days.”
In the course of his extensive portfolio, Mugliett will take on substantial headaches. Tip-toeing between the feuding importers of brand new cars and the importers of used Japanese vehicles, who the previous want to see driven out of business. Seeing off the powerful white taxi lobby which he said last year would have taxi meters introduced shortly and that their monopoly won’t be tolerated if their cowboy attitude doesn’t change. Of course nothing did change and the liberalisation of the taxi service is nowhere to be seen. “We do have a framework for an agreement which covers all taxi drivers, which does not necessarily contemplate liberalisation if we are guaranteed the improvement we want in the taxi service, such as the inclusion of taxi meters.”
He has the Regional Road bridge to take care of, for which the contract for the actual replacement of the road itself has not yet been awarded. And then there is that grand playground for our MPs, building the former opera house into a new parliament, a grand Lm12 million spending spree. “As a site for a theatre it is quite small,” he says, “and it can be a zone of prestige for our citizens who will have a national parliament as a focal point of the capital city as well.”
But his main concern are naturally roads, him being the minister thereof. It is his actual passport, after being promoted from culture minister to transport minister, to becoming one of the more prestigious brahmins of the Nationalist administration. As such, he is bound to be the man to have solved all those road headaches that so many other toiling ministers did not manage to do before losing the portfolio.
“Well, that wouldn’t be fair with those who came before me. I am exploiting to the best that I can that which came before. It is important to that extent that one has sufficient funds and resources, and today we are living in a situation where we have disposable funds which are extraordinary. These are the EU funds and the Italian protocol funds. With these means, you can make extraordinary things.
“What we can credit this ministry with is that we went beyond perceptions of limits of Maltese contractors. There had always been that scepticism about Maltese contractors being unable to make these kind of road-works. There have been changes in work practices, where deadlines are now being kept, with contractors working on weekends and public holidays. The mentality has changed, they even work in the evenings. We also respected the deadline for the presentation of our projects for the funds, even though we had an extension on this deadline.”
All he has left to do as minister of transport is to take a better look at the Bistra catacombs the brilliant Maltese contractors have asphalted over, some twenty years after a Labour government had done the same after uncovering them.
“I think you have the wrong idea. We did not go over the Bistra catacombs. The idea is to leave them open, by downgrading the road and making it narrower and make it one-way traffic. The road in question forks into two roads, one of them leading to a roundabout and the other branches by the Bistra catacombs. This is the road which has been downgraded. But the catacombs have remained uncovered.”