The carriers’ strike announced by the Employers Associating of Road Transport Operators for national regular routes for February 7-9 begins today.  The Employers Association of Transport Professionals “Transportatorul” said they would join in and would suspend the regular routes they serve, IPN reports.

The disagreements between the authorities and carriers arouse last October. The carriers asked for the recalculation of fares, while the government dismissed the request as unfounded.

The sides had a number of consultations, but the carriers ultimately called a strike because “the Ministry of Infrastructure and Regional Development didn’t react to operators’ demands stipulated in the open letter of January 22, 2022. It didn’t review the draft order on the approval of tariffs. It didn’t renounce the illegal mechanism for instituting a new permissive document – the local councilors’ consent to increase fares – and didn’t present real calculations of the tariffs for transport services. It didn’t approve the document by which to set the tariff for bus station services and didn’t abandon support for illegal schemes in the transport sector.”

For his part, Minister of Infrastructure and Regional Development Andrei Spînu recommended the carriers to start to renovate their motor vehicles, to improve the quality of transportation services, to issue tickets to passengers, to maintain the buses and minibuses in a proper form so as not to subject the travelers to risks and to think about the people and their clients first of all.

The minister said that a small group of transport operators started to blackmail a whole country. “The goal is clear. They want the passengers to protest. This is ugly. I call on all the operators not to allow to be provoked by such behavior,” noted the Deputy Prime Minister.

The strike was announced even if the authorities planned a last round of consultations with road transport operators about the tariffs for this week for breaking the deadlock.

see also:
1. Andrei Spînu: A small group of transport operators started to blackmail a whole country
2. Transport operators announce protest: National regular routes will be suspended for three days
3. Employers Association of Transport Professionals supports tree-day protest
4. Operators disagree with proposal to introduce higher tariffs with local councils’ consent
5. Carriers will be able to raise fares with consent of local councils