Light railway tariff to be uniform

The Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit (AALRT) plans to implement a uniform ticket price in August which the corporation believes will minimize mischief’s made by passengers.
Manager of AALRT, Muluken Assefa said that the controllers seize many passengers who pays nothing or pays the minimum fee to travel the whole route. The corporation also said that it collected over 800, 000 birr from penalties from those who by pass the law on the train.
The penalties range from 30 birr for paying the least ticket to travel long distance while 100 birr for traveling without having ticket.
The managers are now contemplating to start a flat fare payment system for a journey instead of different rates that was calculated on the distance.
The corporation will now make adjustment on ticket prices which will make the fee uniform for all distance.
Currently, Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit has 41 trams in its system. But only 34 of them are under operation while the remaining seven are out of service.
According to the manager, the difficulty of maintaining the trams locally hinders to make operational the entire tram on the track that have created burden on the quality of service delivery.
Luck of full fledged maintenance center forced the corporation to send few of the trams abroad for maintenance.
According to the ministry of Transport, Addis Ababa LRT is currently transporting at least 120,000 people per day and over 29 million commuters transported over the past nine months in which the corporation collected about 87.2 million birr revenue from the service.
But the total revenue collected from the daily passengers remains insufficient to sustain its activities as well as maintenance related works.
Muluken said on the problems related to repairing the trams and other challenges are hiking the cost of managing the LRT and requested the government to find a way to subsidize Addis Ababa’s light railways.
The Addis Ababa light railway was built by the China Railway Engineering Corporation (CREC) at a cost of USD 475 million, which 85 percent was covered by China’s Export-Import Bank.