There is a particular kind of silence that only exists at 6:00 a.m…. the hour when I drag myself out of bed to catch a bus I don’t get to choose. Most teenagers complain about waking up early, but there’s something uniquely tiring about rising not because you want to, but because the public transport system has already decided your morning for you.
My day starts long before school does. By 6:30 I’m standing at the stop, watching the sky trade its colour for daylight. On good days, the bus appears. On bad days, the bus appears and keeps going, as if we’re invisible. And on the worst days, it simply doesn’t come at all.
The route I take is singular.
One line.
One possibility.
I envy my friends who have choices. They compare routes the way other people compare cafés, “this one is faster,” “that one always arrives,” “the other one never skips stops.”
An hour and 15 minutes later, school begins. And the day drains whatever is left of me. By the afternoon, when my energy is already stretched thin, I face the same journey back, often even longer, an hour and a half of staring out windows, calculating how much homework I won’t have the energy for once I get home.
I usually arrive around 5:30 p.m, in that blurry state where your brain feels like it’s still on the bus, swaying from side to side. People love to talk about discipline such as time management, study habits, teenage routines. What they never account for is the fatigue that comes from commuting on a system that doesn’t consider how young you are or how much you depend on it.
What I want isn’t extravagant. I’m not asking for luxury, or fancy stops, or buses with free Wi-Fi and comfortable seats, although none of that would hurt. What I want is reliability and a system that respects students by simply functioning the way it promises to. Buses that arrive when the timetable says they will and drivers who stop when they see passengers waiting.
And the Tallinja app, which tries to guide us often misleads us instead. It freezes or it guesses and then on some days, it lies. There’s nothing quite like sprinting toward a bus that the app insisted would arrive in eight minutes.
I’m not the only one talking about this.
Every student I know has a version of the same story, missed buses, long delays, mornings spent chasing hope and afternoons spent chasing exhaustion. And because so many of us depend on public transport to even attend school, the problem isn’t personal, it becomes structural.
And what other choices do we have? Taxis? Twice a day? For school? That’s not a realistic alternative. Not for families already juggling bills and responsibilities. Not for teenagers who have no income of their own. This reemphasises that public transport is supposed to be the bridge between home and education, not an obstacle course.
I want to believe this can change.
I want to imagine a Malta where students don’t need to sacrifice sleep, energy, or sanity just to get to class… but until then, I’ll keep waking up at six, and I’ll keep waiting at the bus stop, in the long line of students who just want the simplest thing:
A way to get to school that doesn’t steal the whole day from us.