The Secretary of State for Transport and Sustainable Mobility, José Antonio Santano, has assured that the new bus concession map will suffer a 20% reduction in all fares as a result of the optimization of routes by increasing occupancy.
Santano considers that the map is “a necessary evolution to make this mode of transportation even more effective, comfortable and competitive in this type of trips compared to the private vehicle, gaining share and thus improving the overall efficiency of the system and responding to the needs needs of the citizens. To ensure this improvement in the quality of transport, the ministry has announced an investment of more than 40 million euros fully available to the Autonomous Communities.
Along with the reduction in cost, the plan also foresees improvements in bus travel time derived from route optimization. Taking as a reference the average time of the routes that occupy the same traffic of people, in the connection between A Coruña and Santander, for example, a reduction is estimated from 9 hours and 7 minutes to 6 hours and 20 minutes.
On the section between Albacete and Alicante, a 28% reduction in travel time is expected, going from 3 hours and 17 minutes to 2 hours and 22 minutes. In the case of Málaga-Valencia, the average time can be reduced by two and a quarter hours, up to 9 hours.
The secretary considers that this transformation will allow “a faster and more agile renewal of the bus fleets linked to the contracts”, thus counting on new information applications, on which the ministry is already working.
Santano has highlighted that the new Sustainable Mobility law, scheduled for 2025, “maintains and consolidates the Spanish bus concession system, the fruit of which we precisely want to guarantee with a new concession map agreed with the autonomous communities, setting specific deadlines to advance in its renewal, which is not that it is necessary, it is that today it is already essential.”
To guarantee its implementation, flexibility mechanisms will also be introduced that will allow various services to be opened to competition in various cases and as long as it is beneficial for the consumer. However, Santano has assured that “it is the exception, the general rule is that we want to maintain our concessional system.”
