Increasing Transport capacity – Ljubljana public passenger transport

By project REGIO-MOB

Published on 23 September 2022

Slovenia

Zahodna Slovenija

About this good practice

The most important task of the public company LPP is to provide safe, reliable and smooth-running public transport in the area of the entire City Municipality of Ljubljana and sixteen suburban municipalities. However, ensuring safe passenger transport during the covid pandemic was a big challenge. The Covid-19 emergency has highlighted the problem of transport overcrowding, due to the obvious need to maintain physical distance between users. In the pandemic context, the perception of public transportation is riskier than private because of the closer contact to other people that is possible, sometimes unavoidable, in public transportation vehicles and stations.

One of the measures how LPP attempting to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic was increasing transport capacity - raising the number of buses in circualtion, so that people can travel whilst maintaining social distancing.

Between January and September 2020, public passenger transport declined by about 50% compared to the same period of 2019. People start to use private cars in the pandemic period - it was not possible to maintain social distance between people in public transport, because of that people felt threatened.

Because of the raising of number of buses in circulation, people felt safer when using public passenger transport in Ljubljana (people can travel whilst maintaining social distancing), therefore the use of public transport has also increased.

Resources needed

All activities related to this good practices were performed with own vehicles in own fleet and with own staff.
Due to all the measures limiting the number of passengers on buses, they traveled an additional 1.2 million kilometers and as a result at least 4.5 million euros in additional costs

Evidence of success

Due to the lock down situation, LPP initially suspended operations, later when the measures were relaxed, they increased the number of vehicles operating. Normally 170 vehicles operate, during the pandemic they operated according to the summer regime - 90 vehicles. And when it was necessary to add (so that people can travel whilst maintaining social distancing), LPP added vehicles to busy lines and reached the export of 120. This was sufficient to cover the needs and comply with the regulations.

Potential for learning or transfer

This good practice is easily transferable and relevant for public transport in general - raising the number of buses in circulation. This kind of action can reduce the risk of spreading coronavirus.

Following the exchange of experiences done during the extension of the project on Covid-19 impact, a collection of the good practices provided by the REGIO-MOB project partners have been discussed and the lessons learnt will be taken into consideration during the design process in the future.