“Too much to pay for a €1.50 bus ticket”

“This year, Atac’s highest energy costs – including gas, methane, diesel and other fuels – amounted to 35 million euros. Next year, we will see a further increase in costs of 25 million euros due to the renewal of the national collective agreement for bus and tram drivers. In total, therefore, we will face an additional €60 million in costs compared to historical expenditure. Under these circumstances, either the region must increase funding for public transport in the capital or resign itself to issuing a decree to raise the ticket price to two euros; Atac’s accounts leave no room for other solutions.” Eugenio Patanè, Rome’s Councillor for Mobility, frames this as a matter of “objective data”. The City Council, in line with the provisions of ATAC’s business plan, envisages raising the single-journey fare from 1.5 to 2 euros after thirty years, whilst simultaneously reducing the cost of resident season tickets, which currently cost 250 euros a year.

However, the region – which has the power to regulate local public transport fares – is not convinced by this argument. In a lengthy exchange with Mayor Gualtieri, the regional councillor for transport, Fabrizio Ghera, pointed out that the region had already increased funding to the City Council specifically to avert the fare rise, as well as having already raised the prices of long-term travel passes. “But those extra 12 million do not cover the 60 million in additional costs that ATAC is incurring due to rising energy prices and the renewal of the national collective labour agreement, which come on top of an already complex financial situation,” replies Patanè, who then adds: “In response to our initial request, rather than increasing the price of single-journey tickets, the region raised the price of the day pass, the 48-hour ticket and the weekly pass – which are usually the types of tickets most commonly used by tourists. However, the effect was to increase the purchase of single-journey tickets whilst reducing sales of the others, so the additional revenue was marginal.”

In short, Patanè believes that ticket prices now need to be adjusted, and not just for tourists. “Increasing prices solely for tourists, as the region has asked us to do, requires a back-office system capable of using the credit cards of those paying via the tap-and-go system to verify their place of residence and thus apply different fares. ATAC has implemented this system, but our calculations based on the data we already have show that this would result in a revenue increase of just 10 million euros – far less than the 60 million in additional costs we have to cover. If the region believes we should not accept the mayor’s proposal to increase the fare, it must provide more funding; otherwise, the company will not be able to survive.”

The councillor therefore provides a series of figures that serve, so to speak, as ‘context’: ‘When I first arrived at the Campidoglio,’ says Patanè, who worked on the staff of the then Councillor for Mobility under Mayor Veltroni, ‘one-third of ATAC’s operating costs were covered by the local council, one-third by the national transport fund and one-third by ticket sales. Now, due to the failure to adjust the national fund and the failure to adjust fares, over 60 per cent of the costs are covered by the municipality. So much so that today we are covering the 35 million euros in additional costs due to high fuel prices by drawing on the municipal budget’s contingency fund. Ticket prices have not risen for thirty years, whilst the national transport fund stands at 5.7 billion and has remained unchanged for thirty years; in real terms, its purchasing power has fallen by 4 billion. This is a problem faced by public transport operators in other Italian cities as well. That is why Astra, the association representing these companies, has asked the government for a 1.2 billion increase in the national fund, but this request has fallen on deaf ears.”

Patanè then points out that Rome has a unique history: “From the national transport fund, after the regional allocation process, we receive only 3.5 per cent, despite accounting for 7 per cent of the total length of local public transport routes nationwide. In practice, we receive half of what we are entitled to, but we cannot reduce the size of the city by decree. All this in a city with 1,700 events a year, which cost us kilometres.”

Meanwhile, however, according to figures revealed yesterday by CEO Paolo Aielli during a meeting of the Rome City Council’s Mobility Committee, absenteeism at ATAC has once again risen to over 12 per cent, with peaks of 15 per cent. Could it be that the real solution to reducing costs and making Rome’s public transport system efficient is the one the Competition Authority has been advocating for years: putting the service out to tender? “The service is already out to tender for 36 million kilometres – the entire suburban transport network, an area the size of Florence – but absenteeism is an issue there too, because the real problem is that there is currently a shortage of drivers throughout Italy, and those who are available work a great deal of overtime, which unfortunately often leads to them taking time off.”