In Mykolaiv, the introduction of e-tickets in public transport was suspended: no investor was found

Mykolaiv authorities have decided to temporarily suspend the introduction of e-tickets in the city's public transport. They plan to return to this issue at the end of 2024.

This was announced by the mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych during his press conference on the results of 2023, reports NikVesti.

He explained that the competition for the introduction of electronic tickets in city transport, announced last November, did not take place, as there is currently no investor ready to invest in the implementation of this idea.

«You understand, there are several ways of conducting this competition. We settled on the fact that the investor who will receive the investment will have to, among other things, install readers in vehicles. This is a large amount of money — hundreds of millions of hryvnias. For example, for this, Lviv took a loan from the EBRD. But we stopped it, because now there are no confirmed initiatives from people who would like to invest in Mykolaiv today,» said Oleksandr Sienkevych.

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He added that they plan to return to the issue of introducing e-tickets in public transport in Mykolaiv at the end of 2024.

«Again, I will say that this problem is connected with the fact that we are close to the demarcation line. And secondly, we still do not have an understanding of how many transport units we will have. I think that by the end of this year we will have a concrete understanding, we will carry out all purchases and we will be able to return to this issue,» added the mayor.

We remind you that the issue of introducing an e-ticket in public transport in Mykolaiv has been discussed for many years. It was planned to implement such a system for the first time in 2016. In February 2017, the president signed a law providing for the introduction of an e-ticket. This allows local self-government bodies to create automated payment systems and completely abandon conventional tickets and cash payments.

In June of the same year, the then deputy mayor for infrastructure issues stated that he did not know when he would be able to implement this project, but at the same time claimed that he had been dealing with this issue since the day he was appointed to the position.

In May 2018, Mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych instructed City Council officials to introduce an e-ticket as soon as possible. At that time, this project, according to the Law of Ukraine, was supposed to be in operation for a year.

A month later, on June 1, 2018, Mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych and Director of Mykolaiv Electrotrans, Volodymyr Yevtushenko, signed a memorandum with the Visa company on the launch of a pilot project for the introduction of an electronic ticket.

Oleh Manushevich, the head of the transport department of the city council at the time , promised to implement the e-ticket system not only on public electric transport, but also on private minibuses by the end of 2018. However, this did not happen by the end of the year.

In November 2020, projects were presented in Mykolaiv regarding the implementation of electronic tickets in city transport. However, as of July 2023, such a project has not yet started working in Mykolaiv.