Children up to 14 years of age will travel for free on public transport. This is provided for in a draft decree of the Council of Ministers, published for public discussion. It amends the regulation of the Minister of Transport on free travel and reductions in bus transport. Currently, the age limit for riding in the city by bus, tram, trolleybus and metro without money is 7 years.
The reason for doubling the age is to reduce the traffic of private cars used by parents to drive their children to school, which will have an environmental effect. This is expected to lead to the creation of a habit of using public transport, which would be key for the future when they grow up.
Greater reductions are also foreseen in intercity transport. The norm remains that children up to 7 years old travel for free by bus. It is proposed that those aged 8 to 14 receive a 50 percent discount, the age range for this bonus is now between 7 and 10 years.
Further reductions in travel and intercity transport are planned. Pupils, students and doctoral students, full-time and full-time students will use city transport on main lines and intercity bus lines from the municipal and regional transport schemes with a ticket at half the price of the carrier’s tariff. Now in the city they enjoy a 30 percent discount, and for intercity transportation – 20 percent.
A new category of discounted travelers has been added – people with disabilities with a reduced working capacity of more than 70.99%. Until now, the municipalities issue them cards with discounts, but do not compensate them with funds from the national budget, it is written in the reasons. The proposal is to provide a minimum amount of 25 percent compensation.
According to data from the Ministry of Health, by 2022 there will be more than 760,000 people with disabilities with a reduced working capacity of more than 70.99 percent. In Sofia, more than 17,000 people with disabilities benefit from discounted cards every day.
Subsidies from the central budget will be granted to municipalities separately for internal passenger transport, inter-village transport, those in sparsely populated mountainous and other regions and inter-district transport. Until now, the latter were missing from compensating carriers.
There is a tendency for companies to refuse to run bus routes passing through settlements even with more than 500 inhabitants. To encourage them, subsidized transport connections are increased from 2 to 3, and annual ones from 730 to 1095. This change affects the population of sparsely populated mountain and border regions in the country.
