Yerevan public transport logs record 3.6 million fare validations in one week

Yerevan Mayor Tigran Avinyan praised the changes introduced in April to improve fare payment on public transportation, noting that the number of ticket validations recorded in the first week of September was a record high.

Sargis Manukyan, director of the Yerevan Center for Management Technologies, presented the statistics on payments made on Yerevan’s public transportation during the first week of the month at a televised executive meeting at City Hall.

“During the first week of September, 209,112 validations were recorded on Yerevan’s trolleybuses, 621,051 on the Metro, and 2,766,415 on buses, for a total of 3,596,578. There is a natural increase of around 15%, due to the start of the academic season,” Manukyan said.

Mayor Avinyan noted that the figures presented for validations on public transportation were record highs, meaning that more people are using public transportation.

“We should also note that the set of measures introduced in April significantly changed the situation in terms of validations. However much this was criticized initially, I think we can now clearly see the results. And the results are the following: all these payments serve to improve public transportation in Yerevan. In fact, this major financial burden, which the municipality largely carried on its shoulders last year, has now been significantly eased. Yes, we continue to subsidize public transportation, but we have also addressed the issue of validations, and we no longer have a practice of complete indifference toward non-payment. And this is a very important point to note,” Avinyan said.

In an effort to reduce fare dodging, Yerevan deployed inspectors who began actively checking whether passengers using public transportation had paid their fares.