December 6, 2019 – Promet Split signed a contract to purchase ten new Mercedes articulated buses as part of the project “Procuring buses for Promet d.o.o. Split from ITU Mechanisms”.
Splitski Dnevnik writes that purchasing another 40 buses, which is expected to be completed in the next year, should reduce the age of the transport fleet to 4 and a half years, says Miroslav Delić, the director of the Split public transport company.
“In the middle of this year, we signed contracts for eight buses under this program, so next year we should complete the story with 52 new buses. If we also mention the possibility of new 40 buses, including four electric buses, which opens a new era in public transport, then we can say that one important step has been made, both for us and the co-owners, as well as for the new administration. Thus, next year, around this time, we should have a completely changed fleet of Promet buses, about a hundred of them,” said Split Mayor Andro Krstulović Opara.
The value of this bus purchase is 30 million kuna, excluding VAT, and the city will pay only 15 percent because the rest of the money has been acquired from European funds. The City of Split will pay 4 million kuna for this procurement, and the remainder is already in the co-owners’ budgets, adds the mayor of Split. The value of both projects amounted to 137 million kuna.
“At the beginning of the year, when I took office, I pointed out the problem with the age of our fleet, which was 13 and a half years old at the time. After purchasing the first 34 buses, the age dropped to 9 and a half years, and from these additional 18, we get to 7 and a half years. When we resolve these additional 40 buses by the beginning of 2021, the average age of the transport fleet should be four and a half years,” Delić points out, adding that this would mean that Promet would be below the average of the countries they are compared to, and 80 percent of its fleet will consist of buses up to one and a half years old. There was a lot of work involved in participating in these projects.
“Of the nine cities that participated in procuring the first contingent of 34 buses, we were the only ones who went without a contract and penalty adjustments of 5 to 20 percent for each utility company, and when you know it’s a 93 million kuna project, you know how much it would cost.
Once we identified the liquidity of the company at the beginning of the year and mentioned the problems with the fleet age, ticketing, no restructuring of the company, no systematization in the last 30 years and many other problems, I can now tell you that in the spring of 2021, all of these problems will be solved, and I am sure of that,” Delić is clear.
Today, there are around 1200 -1300 departures on all routes, with an average of 80,000 people transporting daily.
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