Campania Public Transport

Today at the Auditorium of the Isola C3, at Centro Direzionale of Naples, Regional Minister for Transport Sergio Vetrella has presented to the press and the associations of users and consumers the new fare electronic ticket unified system for local public transport that will enter into force over the coming months.

The aim of the presentation of the new system, already submitted to Provinces and Capital Municipalities, as well as to local public transport companies, is to listen to the citizens’ opinions, through the associations of users and consumers who represent them, in order to share their choices and possibly amend and enhance them.

A share common method of decision-making processes considered as pivotal by Regione, since the final system resolution has not been approved yet by the Regional Executive Board, in order to obtain from today’s meeting the best solution ever to foster public transport, both by offering more and more opportunities to citizens, and by ensuring a right economic balance to Campania companies.

The new system, conceived by Acam, the Regional Agency for Sustainable Transport, provides a testing stage; at its end, based on reports carried out and results achieved, it will be assessed to implement possible amendments or adjustments. Obviously, this important measure is part of all those actions implemented by Regione to progressively enhance the quality of transport services and the economic management and efficiency of the public transport companies.

The main innovations of the new system are:

• Besides the unified ticket, the tickets of single companies are re-introduced, in order to make the fare levels meet the real needs of users, giving them the chance to choose a fare based on the real use. For example, users who reach Naples only by Sepsa do not need possible integration advantages given by the use of Anm means, and they will thus pay a cheaper ticket compared to the unified fare (for example for the single fare a discount from 8 to 20% will be applied compared with the limited unified travel card). Moreover, through a direct involvement and a further empowerment of the single companies, fare evasion, that reached unacceptably very high levels, will be effectively fought (28% average according to Unicocampania Consortium);
• All new tickets will be modern electronic "smart cards" with highly technological microchips, able not only to streamline checks, ticket safety and flows and service monitoring, but also to be used for further uses (banking, e-government, phone services, access controls, entrances to museums and theatres, etc.). Moreover, and not less important, this highly technological and centralised system will improve distribution of proceeds (clearing) among those companies that are part of the unified system, which in the past was based on statistic surveys only;
• The unified fare system will be gradually extended to all companies that perform minimum public land and sea transport services (both public and private): this is how fares will be made consistent and users will be given all the same fare system accessibility;
• The fare scheme will be reorganized and levelled by a structure based on kilometres, increasing the income-cost ratio (that in Campania is one of the lowest in Italy), in order to reduce the likelihood that national regulation sanctions are imposed for our region (stability law 2013).

All the above mentioned, besides simplifying the use of means of transport by citizens supplying a single support that will let them use any mean and will allow to know the real user flows, heads towards the protection of impact of transport costs on family’s finances, safeguarding the season ticket prices to increase customer retention and reduce evasion.