 |
| Arriva, Arriva |
When Arriva's service was launched on 3 July the result was an utter mess. It looked like it was being run by Wile E. Coyote on Mexican magic mushrooms, not the heroic Speedy Gonzalez at the top of his game.
Rightly so, commuters went ballistic. They had not bid farewell to the coughing yellow clunkers to be saddled with purring shiny green ones which refused to show up. Air conditioning on board was nice but it wasn't enough to calm the nerves after an hour baking on a bus stop.
Slowly the service started to improve and now there is a commitment that all will be well. It appears that commuters have noticed the improvement faster than the media did. 20% more passengers used the service in August compared to the same month in 2010.
While 65,000 queries, comments and complaints jammed Arriva's phone lines since 3 July, the average
number of daily customer complaints in August fell to 132. This amounts to under 0.25% of commuters.
In addition, 160 new drivers have been hired to replace the old xarabank drivers who had taken the job with the single-minded purpose of disrupting the service.
We shall wait and see whether we'll be cheering Speedy Gonzalez on in the coming months.
4 comments:
The. 20% increase is not an actual increase in passenger numbers but an indication of how much drivers used to under declare passenger numbers under the previous system
one hiccup still on....
no bus service to st.luke's except for the g'mangia route.
The physiotherapy department @ St. Luke's hospital although highly forgotten sees over 250 patients on a daily basis, besides there are other people commuting daily to karen grech hospital.
Patients need to stop at msida marina and walk up the hill to save time on travelling and mind you very few patients are fit enough to walk up the hill in the first place.
hope that a more convenient route will be set up.
I hope that as from now on the service will be as it should.
In case it is'nt,they can't blame the shortage of drivers,as they have employed 160 new drivers.
Let's wait and see what new excuses they will come up with.
Maybe this time they will blame us and say we are not educated enough and not ready to use such a sophisticated system.
I look forward to trying the new service when in Malta. Has Arriva improved the routes?
Post a Comment