This Friday, the Liberal Initiative presented to Parliament a bill to establish compensation payments to rail users as compensation for the restrictions caused by the strike days.
The Liberals’ proposal follows calls by Ombudsman Maria Lucia Amaral for the government and parliamentary groups to pass laws to find a way to reimburse those who buy passes during transport strikes.
The IL parliamentary group wants passengers holding a seasonal transport pass or ticket to receive “compensation proportional to the price paid for the delay in service.”
Compensation, the liberals specify in the bill, “should be awarded automatically as soon as the passenger provides the necessary data.”
IL proposes that transport operators collect the necessary user data for compensation through the purchase of transport tickets, such as at public ticket offices, vending machines or via the Internet.
The party also explains that these compensations should exclude users whose cost of receipt is equal to or less than one euro or whose transport faults are compensated by viable alternatives for their trip.
In the explanatory note, the Liberals recall the appeal to the Ombudsman and emphasize that citizens affected by strikes at HP “are often forced to use alternative transport to fulfill their personal and professional obligations, resorting to the transport of family members or TVDE services.”
This is a proposal that the Liberals justified from the previous legislature when they proposed to return the cost of the pass on days when there was no service, and the leader at the time, Rui Rocha, demonstrated that the 40 euros of the monthly pass would be divided into 30 days, and that the amount corresponding to each day on which there was a strike and “where there was no minimum service” would be returned to users.
The position taken today by the Ombudsman on this issue follows from the response to a complaint filed by Deco Proteste, which called for “the Constitutional Court to declare the current legislation unconstitutional and to put an end to the legislative discrimination to which users of railways and roads are subjected”.
According to Deco Proteste, “holders of passes and seasonal transport tickets must receive compensation for the service that has already been paid for but not used”, given that this is “a right provided for in the Constitution of the Republic, and compensation must be proportional to the number of days during which the passenger does not use public transport”.
The situation is repeated today: a 24-hour strike at CP – Comboios de Portugal, which will affect rail users throughout the continental territory, and when several unions have already called for “a stoppage of trains until at least the 14th of July”. There have also been recent partial strikes in Carris (Lisbon) and TST (south of the Tagus).
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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