A prayer for public transport

There was some good news last week, at least for bus passengers in Vélez-Málaga: the town has officially become part of the Malaga transport consortium, meaning that bus fares will be considerably cheaper, with some people paying just 95 cents for a trip with the consortium card. In fact, it’s now cheaper to get to Malaga than it is from Torre del Mar to Vélez-Málaga.

I hope that the reduction does encourage more people to take the bus rather than their car for all of the obvious reasons. But …and there’s always a but… I have been a regular on the bus route between Torre and Malaga city for at least 15 years and the experience is as chaotic and stressful now as it was then.

The buses invariably arrive late, there’s an elbow-fight to be the first on (or to get on at all in particularly busy periods), the poor bus drivers must be really fed up of being asked if it’s the direct bus that goes via the motorway, or the ‘ruta’ (route) one that crawls along the N340 coastal road, especially at the weekends when the Mamil brigade (middle-aged men in lycra) are out in force.

There is little or no signage - just last week I managed to help out a confused English couple, an irate French woman who thought it was “une catastrophe” and a gentleman from Madrid who had cut it a bit fine to get to the airport for his flight home (he usually gets the train, but they weren’t yet running again at the time of his trip).

To the uninitiated, it’s not clear where one might catch the ‘ruta’ bus or the ‘directo’, which invariably sees people darting between one bus stop and another, playing a game of bus roulette, while some poor folk might accidentally find themselves in Nerja instead of heading in the opposite direction.

Oh the train! While it’s good news for travellers between Malaga city and Madrid that the AVE is back (including the aforementioned gentleman) and I don’t suppose anyone living between Malaga city and Fuengirola or Álora can relate to this rant, but a train along to Nerja would finally be the real answer to the Axarquía’s public transport prayers.

In the meantime, I doubt politicians will be first in the queue to buy a consortium card and therefore experience the chaos at Torre del Mar bus station firsthand, which is probably why it’s still as chaotic as it was over 15 years ago when I first started using it.