In our own world
Published:
October 7, 2011 at 11:49pm
Bus porn for frustrated Arriva users
RALLIES ACROSS ITALY AS STUDENTS PROTEST BUDGET CUTS
Thousands of Italian schoolchildren and students took to the streets across Italy today to protest youth unemployment and cuts to education budgets.
And in our own little bubble-world, the government dispatches its representative to the university to tell students that it is about to spend even more on them than it is doing already, and he gets yelled at by somebody who doesn’t care because she wants her old bus back.
It’s frightening how cut off from reality we have become.
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When was the last time you used the public transport, Daphne?
[Daphne – No definite article required. I had to use it every day for two months while I had my right arm in plaster a couple of years ago, and it was absolutely horrible, and for six weeks up to yesterday, my husband used the new service every day – from Bidnija, I hasten to add, not Mosta, as we now have a bus service – and was perfectly fine. He approached the exercise as a lawyer of that generation typically would, studying the minutiae of schedules and routes and weaving them together, so he was perfectly fine.]
Whilst you are so right (I had the same experience from St. Paul’s Bay to Imriehel), I must add that you are asking too much research work from a typical student.
I wonder how many who have given thumbs-down to Arriva ever bothered to study schedules and timetables to plan their bus journey; or ask them if they know what an “interchange” means.
These harridans just go to the bus stop and screech at the driver to ask him where the bus is going or if it stops at X, or Y or Z.
Or have our university students discovered that Mater Dei Hospital is next door to university and is the best served route on the network?
And then we have this young woman trying to make a point with a government minister by screeching FW at him when she could have made her point by omitting her fishwife antics and got the proper coverage in the media.
Then we find out from Facebook (where else?) that it was all planned beforehand. The Times is on a slippery slope with their choice of reporters and opinion piece writers. I wonder whether their circulation figures have diminished since the advent of timesofmalta.com and how long will it be before they start charging for access this site.
I am a university student. And trust me, I studied the timetables all too well. So much so that I even used my smartphone to check the arriva website for route diversions and the most updated timetables. The problem I faced, when waiting for the 106 bus at university, at 3pm last Thursday, was that the actual bus service does not follow the timetables. There was meant to be a bus every 15 minutes approximately. There were no 106’s for a whole hour, and then two of them appeared at the same time. That was arriva’s fault.
To add insult to injury, it was raining heavily at that time, and I found out (the hard way) that the bus shelters are designed with gaps between the roof and the sides, so when the wind blows from a particular angle all the water gets in. The laptop case I was carrying absorbed enough water for me to have to wipe the laptop dry when I finally arrived home.
So now I’ve decided to go back to using my car, just as I’ve been doing for the last three years (since I got my license).
[Daphne – How shall I put this, but….do you realise what you sound like? Checking the bus schedule on your smart phone while toting your laptop, and fussing because all three of you got wet because ‘to make matters worse it was raining’, so you took the car instead and then fuss some more because there’s no parking space. You sound like somebody my age, for God’s sake, not a blinking university student.]
Sure I end up parking in some far-away village because that’s where the only vacant parking spaces are to be found after 8am, but walking to the car beats waiting an hour for the bus.
And, when I take the bus I have to walk from the bus stop in front of the Balzan church to my house (near Papillon) because of how the bus route goes to Ta’Qali after that stop, and only returns to Balzan (and to bus stops closer to my house) after this half hour detour. For this I blame Transport Malta, who concocted this abomination of a route.
Mind you, the old route 810 was just as bad. It had a frequency of one hour and used to take a 45-minute detour (in traffic) to St. Luke’s hospital before going to Balzan.
So there you have it pecksniff. A comprehensive list of reasons why the public transport system still leaves much to be desired. So much for your opinion that the reason people give the service a bad rating is because they don’t study schedules and timetables. Do you even use public transport?
Oh, I did not realise that the experience of all people with the new bus system revolves around your husband’s experience. Any other such important facts that you’d like to share with us?
[Daphne – That’s rich, coming from somebody who apparently believes the experience of all people with the new bus system revolves around Miss Abela Garrett’s.]
The same old story repeated again and again [rights reserved by ONE NEWS].
My dear Luke, maybe next time it rains you will be more lucky with the wind blowing from the opposite direction, keeping the water away from the shelter gaps.
Perhaps you were never told not to assume things – so here I go: Don’t assume things. My comment was directly related to what you said on this page, whilst yours is baseless.
I know that Arriva is horrible for some people, because I use the bus, every single week day, and every single week day I hear people – both on the stages and in the buses themselves – complain and moan about how long they had to wait(plus seeing a lot of pissed off people as I’m on a fully loaded bus passing by stages full of people). I highly doubt that everyone is in on a national prank – so I am inclined to believe them; Especially, since this new service has affected me personally as well; I am now taking twice as long(minimum!) to arrive to work in the morning.
comfortably numb !
All little communities have the same problem with their news stories the world over.
So true. They have no idea how good they have it. Pathetic little twerps.
Eliminate stipends. Unfathomable anywhere else in the world.
Introduce a student loan programme. (I gladly took 3 years to repay mine.)
All student ingrates to have their bubble burst and sent to the real world.
Stricter admission standards, and especially, even more strict graduation standards. The face book comments from university students and ‘graduates’ indicate today’s U of M is nothing more than a ‘sophisticated’ high school.
I suggest these ‘students’ google Steve Jobs’ inspirational commencement address at Stanford University. Might help them out of the bubble.
Yeah, but, I’m grateful for the stipend. I’m proud of the fact that we offer such a high standard of education (despite all inefficiencies and sometimes silly ways of managing things) for free.
I like that I worked to meet the standards of my course, and apparently to actually do a Masters in it you have to be in the top ten percent. I think you’re sincerely underestimating both the students and both the standards of the University.
I mean, what other University actually churns out capable Doctors before they turn 25? I don’t know about the rest of Europe, but no University in America can actually do that. Don’t be so quick to put down our blessings.
Define ‘high standards’, Jamie. Then Google the University of Malta’s world wide ranking.
One small point, ‘and apparently to actually do a Masters’. Did you or didn’t you? Fuzzy thinking.
Fuzzy thinking? Moi? I’m in a course, but I still have requisites to reach within that course in order to do a Masters. Between A-levels and a Masters one (typically) gets a Bachelors degree.
If you want, I can lend you my razor. Brain fuzz grows quick.
Oh, and you can’t really judge these things quantitatively. Besides, the University could be underrated, no?
The quality of education is undeniable. Even our A-level Mathematics is comprised of University-level Mathematics abroad. (We actually do really well when it comes to Maths) This sort of over-reaching in syllabi and teaching structures are present in other subjects, such as in Architecture & Civil Engineering, Medicine and Sciences. If we had to compare subject matter of Chemistry and Biology A level here with the same A levels in England, you’d find that we have roughly double the study material, and a significantly higher pass rate.
And, thankfully, some people are really excelling in what they want to do, even without financial means.
But that’s something you don’t care about.
“Churns out”
You have just shot yourself in the foot. The whole point of higher education is to produce excellence. If our university is mass-producing graduates, then by definition they are no longer the cream.
We need to rediscover a 1950s social order: equal rights for everyone, the gentrification of labour, and diplomas for the truly deserving.
Bejnietna, it just shows you never churned butter.
It’s a delicate and serious process that requires attention and a lot of effort. If I really wanted to shoot myself in the foot, I would’ve said “spews” or some other equally disgusting word.
It’s important to be able to pick up on subtleties, you know.
By the way, the butter IS the cream.
“Stay hungry. Stay foolish” – Steve Jobs 2005.
As they might have a difficulty in finding the actual text, this is the link: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
I would make this compulsory reading for all university students, post-docs and academics.
We scientists and researchers should frame it and place it in front of our desks to be read and contemplated on a daily basis.
“Eliminate stipends. Unfathomable anywhere else in the world.”
The Danish have it much better than us, believe me.
Yeah, they get free pastries.
@Harry Purdie… by illustrating that one of the world’s most successful men was a college drop-out. That worked fine for a person of his intellect, vision and determination.
Lesser mortals, however, need a degree or two under their belt to make their way (especially to make their way out of here). And statistics, unfortunately, show that the percentage of students who continue their studies at tertiary level in Malta is still dismally below EU average, despite the sharp rise in recent years.
So the government still needs to pump money into, among other things, stipends – and whatever other initiative is necessary if it hopes to increase this average and, consequently, the country’s competitiveness.
Yet these events are scary in that they show the system is not producing thinkers; or people who attempt to live outside their bubble world by at least knowing what’s going on in the real, big world out there.
It is also of course failing students by not imparting any ethics, but that is a deeper-rooted problem.
We didn’t just produce a generation of ‘Arani Ma’ brats as much as having been – and being – a generation of ‘Arawni, għandi t-tfal’. We have raised children to think the world revolves around them and, even by the time they grow up, they still wouldn’t have realised that in fact it doesn’t.
And it doesn’t owe you anything.
I raised an eyebrow rather cynically when I first read of this little scene. But when I realised that a newspaper had carried a faux news item, and the person writing it knew that, I was even more concerned.
Even the Nowheresville gazette reporting on the ladies’ church bake sale would have higher standards. Sad. Sad all round really.
You said it yourself though, parents raised these kids, not the government.
And thank God for that.
Couldn’t put it any better, Harry, but which political party is going to risk all those votes?
In the meantime, the Skeda Gdida regaled us with Lowell on Bundy’s charabanc, his bile left till the very end, a good five minutes dedicated to the JRS.
The topic chosen for next week is public transport in Malta.
Any bets?
Maltese university students are in for a cultural earthquake sometime in 2013.
I watched the news programmes last night, switching off right after the headlines – if that’s all there is to worry about, I thought, then we really have no worries at all.
Smart Cards for books? Per carita’! I was in a particular shop in Valletta and the lady before me bought clothes with her Smart Card.
Anybody remember the first-year student who bought a complete set of hard-back Danielle Steel novels using her SmartCard “for reference purposes”. It was reported in The Times .
Clothes shops that accept Smart Cards are in bad taste anyway. Besides, students can’t go to school naked.
I generally spend Smart Card money on books, photocopies, notes and stationery, as well as reading books or art supplies – things I wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise.
I’m just saying, you can’t generalise.
I live in Iklin and when we had the old system running we used to have a bus pass through Iklin at the driver’s whim, now we have a regular and reliable service.
[Daphne – And Bidnija never, ever had a bus service despite the pleas of the increasing number of residents. Old people, university students, schoolchildren with heavy bags on their backs, all had to struggle up that difficult long incline in the rain, heat and wind. Now the bus service finally arrives when all the children – they all seemed to be roughly the same generation – have grown up and gone or have cars, and the old people have died. We used to have an unspoken system whereby it was unofficially mandatory for residents driving past anyone walking to or from the nearest bus-stop in Targa Gap to stop and pick them up.]
From Zurrieq to the airport to Mellieha Bay in less than an hour.
And no one from MT is saying that the system does not need further improvement.
One of the principles of TQM is “Continuos Improvement”.
It seems not everyone has realised that the system is designed to make a profit, not ask for subsidies.
That complaints and suggestions are taken seriously to increase the number of clients. Even more so when the contract lasts ten years, and which carries an analysis of performance for its renewal.
It is in Arriva’s interest to make the most of what it can provide. If it means expanding and finetuning routes, reducing the number of buses in depots to a minimum and designing loyalty packages, it surely will.
And yet, here they are, blaming the minister who broke the status quo with the old PTA who expected to be subsidised, with our money, for keeping its monopoly, licence inheritance and the absolute control of anything related to the ‘service.’
It seems they have to blame him for removing something to mumble about.
It’s surely not perfect, but it can improve simply because it has to to survive. Which it will.