Romanian Pensioners To Receive Smart Cards For Discounted Long-Distance Travel

The vehicles will also be equipped with electronic registers and the card readers must be able to send data online.

The cards will be nominal and contain the beneficiary's personal numeric code, the number of trips for which he/she is eligible, the number of used trips and their value. Each card will be valid for one year.

The beneficiaries include pensioners, war veterans and war widows, who are entitled to six simple trips per year, with a 50% discount.

However, the Federation of Romanian Transport Operators (FORT) says the ordinance favors a certain company which sells such systems and estimates the technology will cost more than EUR100 million. FORT says the government could spend an additional EUR850,000 on software and equipment for the Romanian Road Authority, the body tasked with tracking the trips made using these cards.

In early December, Transport Minister Anca Boagiu said the ministry is working on legislation whereby the categories benefitting from discounted transport tickets would compensate their price personally and not through the transport operators.

The Transport Ministry's debts to passenger carriers, accounting for the difference up to the full price of tickets for underprivileged categories, totaled 160 million lei (EUR1=RON4.2626) in December.

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