A travel pass costing nearly 5,000 UAH: Kyiv is set to join the top four most expensive cities in Europe
Following the fare changes, a monthly travel pass for Kyiv’s public transport and metro will rank fourth among travel passes in European capitals. Only London, Amsterdam and Stockholm are more expensive.
This has been reported by the public organisation ‘Passengers of Kyiv’.
Experts compared the cost of the pass proposed by the Kyiv City State Administration at 4,875 UAH (around 110 euros) with prices in other European cities and highlighted a huge disparity between price and service quality.
According to the study, Kyiv residents will be forced to pay on average three times more for a travel pass than residents of Central and Eastern European capitals. At the same time, the Kyiv travel pass will not cover travel on minibuses and the city railway.
“Even the current travel pass, which is very uneconomical for Kyiv residents at 1,300 UAH, costs more than in Prague and Budapest and is on a par with Warsaw and Bratislava. Yet the difference in the quality, convenience and reliability of transport compared to these cities is simply colossal,” note Kyiv’s passengers.
Activists explain that European cities deliberately focus on cheap long-term passes (monthly, quarterly or annual) to encourage drivers to switch to public transport. The cost of an unlimited one-day pass in Europe breaks down as follows:
- Prague – 22 UAH/day;
- Athens – 47 UAH/day;
- Vienna – 66 UAH/day;
- Kyiv (under the new tariff) – 162 UAH/day.
‘In Kyiv, they do everything the opposite way. The Kyiv City State Administration makes monthly travel passes completely uneconomical, and does not offer quarterly or annual ones at all. To recoup the cost of a future pass priced at 4,875 UAH (with a single-journey fare of 30 UAH), a passenger would need to make eight journeys every day. Only active couriers could possibly manage that many journeys,” the organisation notes.
The public organisation has appealed to the Kyiv City State Administration and Mayor Vitali Klitschko, demanding that the current draft decision be rejected, withdrawn from discussion, and that a fundamentally new, balanced fare structure be developed with public participation.
It is worth recalling that the decision to increase transport fares in Kyiv sparked a wave of outrage. In less than a day, residents collected over 6,000 signatures on a petition calling for the cancellation of the new fares. The Kyiv City Council must now consider this appeal.
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