Faced with the persistent problem of traffic jams, which is getting worse as more private cars enter the congested streets of Greece’s major cities every year, there is a debate about how to increase the use of public transportation as one of the ways to deal with the issue.
Over the last few weeks the debate took a deeply political turn as the two main forces of the center left, former prime minister Alexis Tsipras’ new party, Greek Left Alliance, and the present main opposition, PASOK, offered similar proposals for free public transportation; the former covering everyone except foreign tourists, the latter putting an emphasis on the youth.
Although fare-free travel sounds like a radical approach, and would obviously help many low-income riders, transportation experts insist that ticket prices are not the main problem. Most complaints by people who use the metro and buses center around the infrequent service, overcrowding, unreliable schedules and aging vehicles.
Obviously, people’s natural choice would be to pay nothing instead of something. But objective observers of the country’s public transportation system agree that in Greece ticket prices for the metro and buses are reasonable; maybe that is the reason they only cover about one-third of the system’s operating costs.
