For a few weeks now, we have been seeing and hearing comments in the mass media and on social networks about the hardships that users of the Single Electronic Ticket System (SUBE) are going through to register and load their cards as a result of the decision. of the national government to apply a very strong increase in public passenger transportation rates and a scheme with differentiated rates depending on whether users have registered their respective cards or not.
SUBE was created by Decree No. 84/2009.
Until that moment, passengers on buses in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (AMBA) paid our tickets by inserting coins into the ticket booths that bus units had.
The system made it possible to solve the problem of the shortage of coins, accelerated the transfer of passengers to the buses, lightened the tasks of the drivers and made it possible to unify the payment of tickets on buses, trains and subways of the AMBA and was extended to other locations. from Argentina (currently, more than 60).
Likewise, SUBE monitors the circulation (distances and frequencies) of the bus lines.
The enforcement authority of the system was the then Ministry of Transportation.
However, the Secretariat delegated (through an agreement) the administration of the system to Nación Servicios SA, a company controlled by Banco Nación.
There are around 15 million active cards (cards enabled to pay for tickets on buses, trains and subways).
Around 10 million were already nominalized at the end of 2023. So the ongoing nominalization process involves around 5 million cards.
This does not mean that there are 15 million SUBE users: many of the cards counted as active were lost by users and many users own and use (for different reasons) more than one card.
Those who know the system estimate that the number of “unique” users is between 7 and 8 million.
SUBE has an important technological infrastructure and a staff of highly trained technical personnel who are responsible for the management, maintenance and evolutionary developments of the system.
In that sense, it is worth mentioning that although the amounts of payments made with transportation cards are small and the transactions processed through SUBE never recovered pre-pandemic levels, they exceed the total transactions made with debit and credit cards. and prepaid in Argentina (around 3.7 billion).
This data allows us to measure the processing capacity available to SUBE: in 2018, 159 transactions were processed per second.
In comparison, just in 2022, Mercado Pago processed, for its entire ecosystem in nine Latin American countries, 173 transactions per second.
On the other hand, the announced rate increase schedule made many wonder about the level of the so-called “technical rate.”
Today, it is between $1200 and $1500 (depends on who calculates it).
However, there are those who estimate that those numbers will end up no further than USD 1 and USD 1.20.
The elimination of all subsidies would result in a significant increase in the share of transportation expenditure in the salary and a strong impact on the disposable income of families, which requires compensation to restore that income.
Now back to SUBE's problems: right now, the system has a number of glaring problems.
As we said at the beginning of this article, some are the result of the modification of the tariff schedule promoted by the national government: the nominalization of SUBE cards, the delay due to inflation in the daily load limits assigned to the points of the load and the absence of SUBE in numerous cities and towns in Argentina.
In other cases, contrary to the opinion of some, they were at the time the result of very successful technical decisions aimed at maximizing the processing capacity of enormous transaction volumes, the fluidity of this processing and the movement of passengers.
However, technological advancement, the emergence of new means and payment instruments, the digitalization of numerous services during the covid-19 pandemic and profound changes in some of our consumer habits meant that those initial virtues became limitations that necessarily must be improved.
Likewise, the expansion of SUBE would eliminate the possible discretion in granting transportation subsidies in those districts that do not yet have the system, greater efficiency in granting compensation (demand subsidies) that improves the disposable income of lower-income families and better use of fiscal resources.
In summary, today there is a situation unprecedented since 2009: the resources and tools to resolve both the problems that have arisen in recent weeks and the historical structural limitations of SUBE are available.
It only takes some people to make the right decisions and carry out the corresponding administrative acts in one or more areas of the national state.
The work of political officials in the public sector consists of making decisions based on in-depth knowledge of a specific issue and an accurate diagnosis that materializes in schedules and files that move the state machinery to make people's lives easier.
It is hard work that requires a lot of dedication.
In this case, it is not that “there is no money”: there is no management.