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Not just taxis. There is another front that puts mobility in Italian cities to the test. It is local public transport, buses, subways, trams, regional connections. A sector that has 900 companies, 114,000 workers and a turnover of around 12 billion euros. But today he is far from being in good health, on the contrary.
Businesses say it, politics say it, finally even the experts say it: first Covid and then smart working have dealt a huge blow to demand. And the National Transport Fund, with its 5 billion euros, has become, year after year, an increasingly short blanket for the costs incurred by too many companies, pulverized, forced into dwarfism, and which however guarantee an essential service.
Result? The Municipalities – which receive the resources from the Regions, which in turn collect them from the State – are forced to add the difference by using their own funds to honor the service contracts (see the 2022 budget data on this page). And in the meantime, the Ministry of Infrastructure led by Matteo Salvini opens a window and announces that it is working on the dossier, recalling that it has already allocated 900 million in the budget for rapid mass transport.
Italy black jersey in the EU for metro, trams, suburban trains
The resources node
«We need 1.6 billion more euros, 700 million for inflation adjustment and another 900 million to sign the contractual renewal of the bus and tram drivers who are asking for an 18% increase in wages: without this money the system risks collapse» , explains Fabrizio Molina, general director of Agens, the Confindustria association that brings together the main companies in the sector.
Agens is echoed by the unions but also by Anav and Asstra: the latter denounces a lack of resources that are not capable of compensating for operating and operating costs. Let alone the investments. To get an idea, we are talking about a collapse in demand which in 2022 was around 21% (Asstra estimates report -12% in 2023 but the financial statements with the real numbers have yet to be closed). In the city of Milan alone, between 200 and 250 million passengers were lost in 2022, resulting in lost revenue of 100 million euros.