Starting in September, a BKK line ticket will cost 450 forints, a ticket on buses will cost 600 forints, and a 10-combination ticket will cost 4,000 forints, the price of the passes will not change, the mayor announced on his Facebook page on Friday. Currently, a line ticket costs HUF 350, and a combined ticket costs HUF 3,000.
“We need to raise the prices of BKK line tickets so that you don’t need a pass and public transport in Budapest is safe,” Gergely Karácsony wrote. He added: the price of line tickets has been unchanged for ten years, MÁV, Volán and many big cities have already raised prices in recent months; “We can’t do anything else in Budapest.” In the post, the mayor pointed out that Budapest currently has one of the cheapest tickets among Hungarian cities.
According to his announcement, the ticket price was raised so that the price of the passes would not have to be increased, and to encourage people to buy a pass instead of buying an occasional ticket, and if they already have a pass, they use public transport even more. “In recent years, we have done everything to ensure that the people of Budapest feel as little as possible from the government’s restrictions,” he wrote, adding: “Now we have exceeded the minimum for the sake of a safely functioning Budapest, for the sake of the future.”
Regarding the ticket price increase, the Budapest Transport Center (BKK) told MTI that this step was necessary due to the economic processes of recent years, the drastic increase in energy prices and general inflation. BKK also explained that since the end of the epidemic, more and more people are returning to public transport, but overall, BKK’s ticket revenue has decreased significantly over the past four years: by the end of 2022, it was 16 percent lower than in 2019, while expenses rose drastically due to the increase in energy prices and general inflation. The maintaining capital is increasingly burdened, public transport has cost the capital HUF 60 billion more than 7 years ago, the announcement states.
(szabolcsinap.hu)
