The crucial meeting of the Metropolitan Transport Authority (ATM) next day Decembre 19th will have on the table a rate increase for 2024. The price of the metro, the bus and the rest of the forms of public transport takes frozen for five years, partly to promote its use after citizen suspicions during the pandemic and to alleviate the impact of inflation derived from the war in Ukraine. But the rising cost of electricity and fuel is suffocating the operators, another burden for the precarious financing system for Barcelona’s metropolitan transport.
According to ‘El País’, the ATM will present to its board of directors a 6.75% increase for next year, distributed in a diverse way in the different subscriptions. It could thus penalize sporadic uses more, compared to longer-term subscriptions, a policy that has already been applied in the last decade to reward recurrence. The ATM is made up of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Barcelona City Council and the Metropolitan Area.
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The impact on the passenger’s pocket could be cushioned by the State bonuses for public transport, pending confirmation for 2024. In the last year, this reduction from the central government plus another applied by the autonomous communities has significantly lowered the price of the most used card in Barcelona, the T-Usual, which today costs only 20 euros for a month of unlimited travel . The start of the year will maintain the discounts but it is likely, as suggested by the new minister Óscar Puente, that they will decline at some point in 2024.
It is the case that in October the ‘Comuns’ forced the Catalan capital to position itself in favor of freezing rates for another year. They brought to the plenary session a motion that garnered the favorable vote of all municipal groups, although the deputy mayor Laia Bonet (PSC) already warned then that public transport could not be indefinitely “good, nice and cheap” for the user.