The Arrecife City Council will take to the plenary session of March the specifications to tender for the urban public transport service. This was announced this Thursday by the Councilor for Transportation of the capital's Consistory, Lorenzo Lemaur, who assured that "it is unsustainable to maintain a service with losses of one million euros".
Lemaur, who has announced the decision of the current Government Group to the Works Council of the urban public transport service workers, explained that the City Council has initiated "the preparation of specifications to manage the municipal buses indirectly, through a specialized company".
Likewise, he added that the capital corporation has also started the realization of a planning of direct and diagonal bus lines "that allow users to save time and thus promote the use of public transport".
Losses of almost 1 million euros
In Lemaur's opinion, the management of the public transport service by the Arrecife City Council until now, "has not been the most efficient, nor the most economical, and the data show it". The capital's councilor refers at this point to the comptroller's report regarding the economic result of the municipal bus service for the year 2008, which shows "expenses close to 1,300,000 euros, while the income only reaches 300,000 euros, which shows that the municipal bus service dragged a deficit of almost one million euros".
For the Councilor for Transportation of the City Council, another of the problems of this municipal service is the decrease in users produced in the last year and the lines that are too long. In this regard, he proposes direct and diagonal bus lines. "The bus lines that exist today, due to the circular route they take, are not effective, since the user instead of saving time on a bus, loses it," he says.
Almost 200,000 fewer users
The latest data known about the number of users of the urban public transport service reflect that in the last year almost 200,000 users were lost, reaching a total figure of 682,332 travelers. Of these, about 170,000 were pensioners, while more than 26,700 users used the student pass.
