The Ministry of Infrastructure has prepared a draft order that provides for a single bus-station charge of UAH 1 per ticket for the entire country. This is stated in the draft document, which is published on the website of the Ministry of Infrastructure.
The relevant changes will be made to the Procedures for Regulating Operations of Bus Stations, which the Ministry of Infrastructure approved on 27 September 2010.
The explanatory note to the draft order states that passengers and carriers are dissatisfied with the fact that the bus-station charge is pegged to the cost of a ticket and the length of a journey. The Ministry of Infrastructure considers such a complaint justified because passengers, in any case, receive the same level of service at bus stations. In addition, a higher charge will result in increases in the cost of tickets for passengers and reductions in the profitability of carriers.
The Ministry of Infrastructure analyzed the experience of the European Union and concluded that a unified charge exists there. "Owners of bus stations provide their services to passengers exclusively for the sale of tickets and charge a fixed amount of money for this, without taking account of the cost of the ticket or the travel distance," the explanatory note states.
The Ministry of Infrastructure recently announced its intention to replace the bus-station charge with a fixed charge levied on passengers in the second quarter of 2015 and abolish it legislatively in the fourth quarter of 2015. This initiative is contained in the "Road Map for the Road Transport Industry in the Years 2015-2016," the text of which the ministry published in June 2015.
