Malta was an ‘unmitigated disaster’, former Arriva CEO admits

The former chief executive of Arriva has described the 2011 privatisation of Malta’s bus service as an “unmitigated disaster”.

“Malta was an absolute unmitigated disaster. Everything else in Europe has been successful, but this one we’ll put our hands up to, that it all went wrong,” David Martin said in an interview with UK transport magazine RouteOne.

He said that one of the major reasons for failure was the resistance faced by the owners of the original yellow buses.

“Malta historically was owner-drivers running mostly UK buses, such as Leylands; very colourful, very decorative, but with no structure, no regulation, nothing at all,” he said. “It was a very bold move of the Maltese politicians to actually want a big bang approach and to regulate bus services and completely tender the whole service provision for the island, which they duly did.

“They probably spent a huge amount of money on some parasitic consultants who certainly charged an awful lot for their services and created something that was absolutely, totally unworkable.”

Arriva, which operates in several European countries, ceased its Malta operations in 2014 after the new Labour government nationalized the public transport service. Public transport was re-privatised the following year, this time to Spanish bus operators Autobuses de Leon.

Martin recounted that Arriva had bid against a specified timetable, but without the infrastructure to support the timetable and several missing links within it – namely traffic flows to the university, Mater Dei and schools.

“Having put in a bid for what we asked to do, there was a clear situation that politically they could not afford that, so therefore there was a lot of quantitate engineering, if you like, to get the cost back to something like they could actually afford.

“What it meant was that we made mistakes as well and promised things that were undeliverable in reality. We just did not understand the impact of traffic congestion, the differences between the tourist systems, the fact the police will not control the traffic at all, the fact that the local authority promised us a whole array of bus lanes and individual bus lanes relative to the stops, particularly with our articulated buses.

“And for a whole series of reasons, nothing was delivered and effectively it just went completely and totally wrong.”

Martin also said that the number of accidents involving Arriva buses was “unbelievable” and that the quality of drivers on the island was “incredibly bad”.

"We struggled to maintain anything to do with sensible driving standards."

“Maybe the learning there from a political sense, and indeed from ours, is that going somewhere completely cold and new and attempting in one go to change everything with a poor partnership approach is doomed to failure,” he said. “There are some lessons we take from that, as Arriva has taken from that and talks about it openly with new countries and new tendering authorities elsewhere, in order to avoid the mistakes that we’ve seen.”