Valencia’s bus company loses €22M in ticket sales due to pandemic.
VALENCIA City Council estimates the Municipal Transport Company (EMT) lost €22 million in the sale of tickets during 2020 as a result of the pandemic.
This emerges from the comparative income of last year compared to 2019, figures that will be passed to the Ministry of Finance which has asked city councils for the mobility company balance sheets to access cash from a Covid compensation fund.
City Mayor, Joan Ribó, assures that the financing of transport in Valencia “will see further delays since the central government had assured that this line of funding would arrive promptly and now we see that it will not”.
“In Valencia we have a historical deficit of funding with respect to the rest of the metropolitan areas of Spain,” she said in a statement.
The Mayor recalled that “in June 2020, Madrid and Barcelona received a special fund to compensate the losses of their transport authorities and their intercity buses”, while Valencia did not.
“It is now time for Valencia (to receive the funding), and the swiftness in this case must be mandatory”.
Referring to the losses in income and footfall, Ribó stressed that the situation is “serious and only the good economic management carried out by the EMT since 2015 has allowed us to maintain until now”.
“The City Council has had to face, alone, the financing of public transport but we can not allow a new oblivion of Valencia,” she warned, adding: “For more than a year we have experienced the pandemic and restrictions on mobility; now the request for information has been made and we still do not know when we will have the money,”
Councillor for Mobility and President of EMT, Giuseppe Grezzi, reiterated that “with the crisis generated by the coronavirus crisis and the restrictive measures, the turnover of the EMT in Valencia fell by about 50 per cent in 2020 compared to the previous year.”
