After three years of frozen rates, the Metropolitan Transport Authority (ATM) has approved public transport rates for 2024, establishing an average increase of 6.75%. It is planned that some titles such as the T-Usual, the T-Jove as well as those intended for single-parent and large families keep the 20% bonus from the ATM itself. However, the final price will depend on a decree from the central government that must determine whether or not the state bonus is maintained (which would raise the total discount to 50% for certain titles), since the new Minister of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, Óscar Puente, has opened the door to the withdrawal of aid in the not too distant horizon.
These aid were approved in September 2022 in a post-pandemic context marked by the decrease in the number of public transport usersa circumstance that also coincided with the end of numerous toll concessions and was ua measure intended to fight inflation, against the economic consequences of the war in Ukraine and which, through the promotion of public transportation, sought to reduce energy dependence and consumption of fossil fuels. This last objective has been once again proclaimed by the recent United Nations Conference on Climate Change, COP28, whose final declaration announces the beginning of the end of the era governed by this type of fuel, which is consistent with the promotion of public transport and the maintenance of subsidies can contribute to this.
However, the continuity of these measures raises at least three questions. The first has to do with the tendency to lose value granted by citizens to services whose cost is perceived as zero despite not being zero, since it is financed via taxes although it does not imply an immediate disbursement by users. The second is linked to how regressive subsidies that do not discriminate between beneficiaries by income level can bealthough they may contemplate corrections based on personal situations, as for example happens with large or single-parent families.
And, finally, there is the question of to what extent the maintenance of this and other stimuli will be compatible in the medium and long term. after the deactivation of the escape clause of the Stability and Growth Pact which has allowed, since the pandemic, to freeze the deficit and public debt rules, and with the agreement reached this week by the EU Ministers of Economy and Finance that demand reduction of the deficit and debt, despite granting room and flexibility to governments to decide how to do it. Spain, with a debt that exceeds 100% of GDP and with a public deficit estimated at 3.2% for 2024 by Brussels, will have to undertake severe adjustments if it wants to adhere to the debt criterion of 60% of GDP and the of 3% deficit foreseen in the Stability and Growth Pact. In the short term, it seems difficult for Barcelona and other cities in Spain to emulate Montpellier, which has just decreed free public transport for its half a million inhabitants within the framework of another European commitment, that of the Green New Deal. Here, fulfilling both seems incompatible.