There is no sustainable mobility without a strong Local Public Transport system, a system of over 930 companies that moves over 15 million people every day. Covid 19 and the new transport services required, and in the same context, the convergence between ecological transition and digitization and, following the Ukrainian conflict, the energy crisis and inflation, require targeted interventions to promote the competitiveness of the sector, the stability of the regulatory framework and the certainty of the economic resources available. Asstra underlines this, which will place at the center of the debate of the XVII National Conference 2023, scheduled for next Monday, the requests to achieve the objectives through 4 areas of intervention.
We start from the rules with a regulatory intervention that eliminates any lack of homogeneity of the national regulatory framework with respect to the community sector legislation contained in Regulation 1370/2007/EC; revision of the Consolidated Law on investee companies which goes towards a simplification and elimination of constraints and limits for investee companies that are not consistent with EU principles and with the objectives of competitiveness and non-discrimination; revision of the national provisions on interregional state services which are illegitimate due to incompatibility with the Community and national regulations on local public transport services.
On the resource front, Asstra is asking for automatic indexing mechanisms from the National Transport Fund; additional structural injection of operating account resources to support and accompany the huge and extraordinary investments and finance the new LPT services; acceleration of payment processes; full coverage of “Covid-19 lost revenues” for 2021 and 2022 and structural and automatic interventions to cover higher energy costs; full application of the “standard costs” taking into account the technological innovations, the new programming objectives and the different cost dynamics; criteria for automatic updating of tariffs in service contracts (so-called “price cap” regulated by the Art) and greater tariff flexibility in favor of companies; incentives for the dissemination of electronic ticketing systems and the digitization of payments to make local public transport more attractive and innovative and stem the growing phenomenon of fare evasion.
The third area of intervention is that of innovation with a convergence towards an energy transition always and in any case aimed at the purchase of alternative fuel vehicles, but more appropriate gradually, in order to take into account the different territorial realities and needs, the real and timely implementation of necessary investments and reconcile the objectives of reducing emissions and social, with the economic sustainability of companies; neutrality of governance in the management of integrated digital systems (“for example Mobility-as-a-Service in order to guarantee fair treatment and non-discrimination of the operators involved, considering the tariff lever as a fundamental factor for the competitiveness of companies.
For corporate policies, Asstra indicates an increase in labor productivity levels associated with a system of industrial relations suited to the challenges of the technological process; promotion, according to industrial logic and on the basis of market contexts, of synergies between companies through forms of aggregation between companies for the realization of common objectives (e.g. centralization of purchases), production (e.g. synergies on the fleet), organizational ( e.g. shared staff personnel and circularization of skills).
Source-www.adnkronos.com