Bus operators fined €170,000 for missed trips in 2018

One in every 50 scheduled bus trips in 2018 did not take place according to Transport Malta, which monitors the national bus service and imposes fines when the private operator fails to provide a service.

“Malta Public Transport completed 98% of the trips scheduled in 2018,” a Transport Malta spokesperson told MaltaToday when asked on the reliability of the service during the past year.

As regulator, Transport Malta also imposed close to €170,000 in penalties on any missed trip which occurred last year.

This represents a slight improvement over the past year. The average reliability during 2016 was 95% whilst that of 2017 was 97%. In 2017, Transport Malta issued penalties to the tune of €183,559.

Since fines were introduced in April 2016, Malta Public Transport has been fined a total of €436,000.

Transport Malta monitors the reliability of the bus service by calculating the ratio between the actual number of trips fulfilled against those scheduled. The ratio is worked by gathering GPS data from all the buses in service, so that the ratio is actual and not just a sample. Although there has been considerable improvement over the past years, regular users still report hitches, delays and the occasional failure of the expected bus to materialise. But the number of bus users has kept also thanks to the increase in foreign workers.

2018 was a record year with almost 54 million passengers using the service. The first months of this year are, yet again, showing an increase in passengers, the TM spokesperson confirmed.