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copyright 2002 by the ARTS Consortium. ARTS is a project within the fifth framework programme of the European Union - competitive and sustainal growth.
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RUral Transport integration in the north-west part of Ourense province
Description of the demonstration in several languages
de | en | es | fi | gr | hu | sw
Place: Galicia, Spain
RUTO; RUral Transport integration in the north-west part of Ourense province
SPAIN / GALICIA
The RUTO demonstration is based on the integration of school and conventional bus services in the East of the province of Ourense. The availability of very well organised school transport services will supply other users with a two-trips-per-day service to the main towns of the area, where school centres are located.
The timetables for services included in RUTO are based on school needs. There is a service in the morning arriving at school centres at 9.30 and an afternoon service coming back from towns, which leaves the main towns at 16.30. The services run from Monday to Friday. There are no services on weekends or holidays.Usually there is one stop per town, located in the main road in the small towns and in front of the school centres in the main villages.
Taking into consideration the nature of the economy in the area, based on farming activities, and the fact that people do not commute to go to work every day, the school timetable is perfectly suitable for administrative issues, medical care, shopping and other similar trips. This measure will ensure both the improvement of conventional transport services and the possibility for transport operators to increase their profits.
The RUTO demonstration has not varied the previous situation in terms of routes design, transport operators election or transport funding of the school transport services. Its objective has been to share the free places of these already existing services with other passengers, specially in the cases where no other regular public transport exists. The buses that run the services included in the RUTO demonstration have a total capacity of 376 seats. There are only 201 students of compulsory education levels. Thus, there are 179 free seats - these seats will be occupied by students of non-compulsory education levels or by regular passengers that need to go to the main cities of the municipalities or of the area.
Fares:
School fares for students in compulsory levels (6 to 16 years) are financed by the Regional Education Administration that contracts services with the transport company directly. The rest of passengers will pay a single fare of 1 ? per trip. There is a 20-trips pass with a 20% discount (total price 16?).
Transport Operators:
There are two transport companies participating in the RUTO demonstration. These companies were involved in regular or school transport services in the area before RUTO was designed. As RUTO is applied on school services already existing in the area, the companies involved are the ones that were in charge of these services before.Most of the routes included in RUTO cover areas with no other regular public transport or only with regular services run by the same operator like the school services but with different timetables. Consequently, most of the routes have no competition with other transport operators.
Public Authorities:
There are two Public Authorities directly involved in RUTO: the Regional Transport Administration and the Regional Education Administration.
Traditionally, there has been no integration between regular transport services and school transport services. School services and regular services have been run separately generating a duplicated public transport network that, specially in rural areas with low demand, divides this low demand even more and further reduces the possibility to run profitable services.
Since financing issues are an important factor that prevent the coordination between regular and school services, the main point of RUTO has been to achieve an agreement between both administrations: The Education Authority has accepted to include some of the school transport routes in RUTO and the Transport Authority has issued some special licences to allow the school routes to pick up non-students passengers. These licences have a temporary character, applying from 8th of January until 20th June, when school period finishes. These licences also regulate the ticket fares., free for students from compulsory levels ?as they are already financed by the Education Authority- and 1? per single ticket for the rest of passengers.
The objective of the Spanish demonstration project RUTO is to combine two parallel new measures.
First, the integration of existing transport resources such as conventional public transport and school transport and, second, the implementation of a new scheme launching on-demand taxi transport.
As regards to the first measure, some legal problems may be encountered because the Spanish Transport law only allows shared travel between regular and school passengers on the regular services and not on the school services. In this case, the integration will be based on regular passenger using the current school services, so special agreement has to be reached with the Regional Council of Education which finances school transport in the region. A special agreement has to be achieved with the Regional Council of Education, in order to increase the number of places in the vehicles at least by about 25%. This measure will ensure both conventional transport services improvement and will give opportunities for transport operator's profits increasing. There is no legal barrier to carry out this measure.
Other barriers may arise because of cultural behaviour. These difficulties comprise organisational barriers concerning co-operation with and between administrative bodies as well as cultural barriers such as reluctance of potential users and/or parents of pupils.
The implementation of on-demand services is hindered by strict taxi regulations
which do not allow charging by seat, route repetition nor picking up passengers out of the municipality where the taxi has been licensed.
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