The MTA plans to implement discounts for children and young people by bus and subway from 2009

The Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA) is preparing a comparative study to evaluate the possibility of including discounts on Barcelona hotels public transport tickets for groups such as children, youth and the elderly.

As explained by the secretary for MTA, Manel Nadal, the MTA was studying and forecasting is to include variations pricing starting next year.

Thus, the MTA has launched a study to find out the demand situation in Catalonia and compare it with other cities in Spain and Europe which are carrying out social tariffs in order to be able to propose policies discounts here too, especially for children and youth, and promote the use of public transport by some groups who will be the users of the future.

One of the study is to extend the age of free for children. Today, after 4 years have no discount on the ticket.

However, Nadal has highlighted the need to balance these Barcelona hotels discounts or free tickets with economic sustainability of the system itself, which currently has a cost of 1,000 million euros to assume a 55% different administrations, while the rest covered the fare.

We will have to consider, he said, how this cost is redistributed to avoid deterioration of the service, as has happened in some European cities who opted for free Barcelona hotels tickets and after five or ten years they had to re-establish tariffs.