No matter the job we do, we all have to handle complaints. There are some who are easily satisfied, others from whom we can learn and, I have to say, others who are just obnoxious. I guess we can all recall those “classic complainants” of times past, when we’ve had to bite our tongues for fear of saying something we might later regret. Some of these people stop at nothing to stir, no matter what we say. It’s a fact of life that you can only please so many people. I once even had a rant from someone whose complaints were so inconsequential that, in desperation, he had nothing left to moan about other than he felt the quality of our printed timetables were too lavish!!!
In all this, I’ve never heard of anyone going on hunger strike about a bus service, though. That’s what’s happened in Malta. Feelings may be running high out there but someone is currently so upset with the new bus system there that he’s prepared to die. Said Mr Cini, “If I am taken to hospital against my will and I am unconscious or something of the kind, I refuse any kind of intervention”. Crumbs.
After what’s happened in Malta, no one should ever underestimate the perils of promising the moon when it has proven impossible to deliver the earth. For, there appears to be a difference between raised expectations and actual service delivery.
There are few occasions when such a major change happens. Actually, I can’t think of any. One of the closest we saw in England was deregulation and, even then, even during the early muddles, services generally retained their numbers and routes. Much later, when Transdev Yellow Buses re-wrote the rules in Bournemouth, you only heard from the displaced, in spite of massive passenger growth.
Not even Dorset next week will see such a change, though perhaps Dorset school transport next term might. There are lessons for Go South Coast and the media will be quick to chide if things go badly. Make no mistake, the scale of the change in Dorset school transport is such that there *will* be teething problems. The spotlight will be on managers to see how quickly they resolve them.
If anyone can turn a difficult situation around, it should be the likes of Arriva. Piling in like the cavalry is a cohort of experienced UK managers & supervisors. And poor Mr Cini’s complaints that he now needs three rather than one bus to get from home to his desired destination isn’t anything to do with Arriva. Indeed, it’s not Arriva’s managing director he blames, it’s the minister he wants to see resigning. The minister appears to be saying the right things as regards Mr Cini and the minister seems to be acting as a model in how to deal with the serious complaints. Whether that will satisfy scalp-hunters remains to be seen.
3 comments:
A lot of problems with the new arrangements in Malta can be fairly laid at the door of the Transport Malta people and the advisers who determined the route network.
Unfortunately, Arriva has also been less than clever by having no proper literature available, too little contingency for both drivers and vehicles, too little testing of ticket machines, destination screens etc etc
All in all a very poor performance by all concerned - but then who on earth would have ever thought a 'Big Bang' approach was best ?
A foretaste of Dorset perhaps ?
The new Maltese network is a perfect example of How Not To Do It.
Designed by UK consultants rather than island residents, at the behest of a government which (judging by the comments in the Maltese press) didn't consider it necessary to ask the local councils (let alone the passengers!) what they wanted, and with no attempt to involve the incumbent bus operators whose network had grown organically over the years.
In fact, reading the local press, it seems to me that one of the unspoken justifications for the change was to get rid of the "troublesome" bus owner's cooperative ATP at any cost; the ATP members clearly believed that, and they unsurprisingly reacted in an extremely negative way to the changes.
Add in a franchise winner which seemed to underestimate the strength of local distaste for the changes and also the misplaced belief by Maltese drivers that they should earn the same as the highest paid UK bus drivers (whilst only working bare minimum hours), stir the mix with with a naive belief that because "the plan" came from the Maltese government, it would work from the get-go and heat it up with some untried technology on which the whole system relied, and what you end up with is a recipe for disaster if anything at all went wrong.
What went wrong, as we now know, is that some of the ATP members signed up for the new company and then (being charitable) had second thoughts so didn't show up. The figures have varied but anything between 65 and 180 drivers failed to show up for their new jobs, and that's enough to cause huge problems on even the best planned network. The Maltese network, well, as we all know, collapsed.
And now, even though the buses are running, it's becoming apparent that many of the routes the consultants and TM designed are simply not fit for purpose and changes are being rushed through already.
What a wonderful way to ruin a bus network!
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