The President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, unveiled this Monday a diploma creating the Incentiva+TP program, which aims to encourage the use of public transport and increase the autonomy and fairness of transport authorities.
The decision to promulgate the decree-law was published this Monday on the president’s website.
On January 18, the Council of Ministers approved the decree-law establishing the legal regime of Incentiva+TP, a program included in the state budget for 2024 (OE2024), approved by the Assembly of the Republic last November.
The Minister of Environment and Climate Action, Duarte Cordeiro, explained at the time that the program “consolidates and reformulates existing support programs” (PART and PROTransP) aimed at transport authorities, namely intermunicipal communities and metropolitan areas.
“This makes it easier to apply different types of support while concentrating on one mechanism. This will ensure that transport authorities now have more fairness and autonomy in developing public transport measures. In other words, it gives them more flexibility in awarding funding. “, explained the government representative.
Summarizing, the Minister of the Environment emphasized that this program allows us to support the reduction of tariffs “for those with a large number of transport users,” the expansion of supplies, as well as the improvement of the interface.
Duarte Cordeiro said the changes would increase the program from €260 million “total of all components” to €410 million in the 2024 budget.
“To ensure continuity in the future, this diploma establishes that, at a minimum, it is guaranteed that the amount to be transferred from one year to the next will be at least identical to the amount of the previous year, with an appropriate update rate,” emphasized He.
The official also noted that mandatory funding for this program from municipalities will be maintained, but that “equity criteria will be introduced to strengthen regions of the country with less public transport.”
“On the one hand, we will take into account the number of public transport users and the average time spent on the road. On the other hand, we will take into account the so-called share of public transport use,” he noted.
In this sense, Duarte Cordeiro explained that “when the share of public transport in a region is very low, that area receives a bonus and less funding from municipalities.”
“When public transport quotas are higher, there is obviously a smaller bonus in support and a larger contribution from municipalities in these territories. There is a mechanism that makes this system fairer,” he said.
PART, created in April 2019, was a program to fund transit authorities to implement and develop policies to support lower fares on public transit systems.
The goal was to reduce mobility costs for families while also expanding service offerings and network expansion.
It was this program that allowed the Lisbon and Porto agglomerations (AM) and intermunicipal communities (CIM) to maintain current transport prices and increase their supply.
The PROTransP program, also created in 2020 by the government, gave preference to “areas where the penetration of these modes of transport is lower and where the potential for growth in demand for cars is higher, thereby promoting the development of shared public transport.” creating more sustainable mobility models and decarbonizing mobility.”
PROTransP was aimed at increasing the amount of public transport in intermunicipal settlements and in areas with low housing density.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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