The Transport Bureau (DSAT) has said that the average daily number of public bus passengers in July stood at only around 110,000, which was “the lowest recorded over recent years”.
DSAT officials made the remarks during a meeting with members of the government-appointed Traffic Consultative Council on Thursday last week. The bureau announced the meeting in a statement yesterday.
According to the statement, one of the topics of last Thursday’s meeting was about the adverse impact of the 618 COVID-19 outbreak on Macau’s public bus services.
Macau’s latest COVID-19 outbreak that began on June 18 is also known in Chinese as 618 outbreak, which subsided in late July. “618” refers to the fact that the outbreak started on June 18.
Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, only limited public bus services were provided during a 12-day period in July. Only certain groups of people, such as those working in sectors that were allowed to remain open or those going to healthcare facilities to seek medical treatment, were allowed to catch a public bus during the 12-day period.
During last Thursday’s meeting, according to yesterday’s statement, DSAT officials said that there were around 107 million public bus passengers during the first eight months of this year, meaning around 442,000 passengers per day on average during the period.
The statement said that the 442,000 represented a 16-percent decrease from last year’s average daily number of public bus passengers.
The 442,000 represented a 30-percent drop from the number in 2019, the year before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the statement said.
Yesterday’s statement also said that there were around 8,800 public bus trips per day on average during the first eight months of this year, a year-on-year drop of about seven percent from last year’s corresponding period.
Meanwhile, the statement also said that 506 traffic accidents involving public buses were reported during the first seven months of this year, and the city’s two public bus operators were to blame for 255 of them.
During the seven months, the statement said that for every 100,000 kilometres, the number of traffic accidents involving public buses for which public bus operators were to blame stood at 0.9, a decrease from 1.1 in 2021. According to the statement, certain councillors opined during last Thursday’s meeting that the improved figure indicated the two public bus operators’ ongoing campaign to strengthen safety management and install more new-technology devices on buses that help promote traffic safety.
These two photos taken from the websites of Transmac and TCM yesterday show schoolchildren catching a Transmac (left) bus and a TCM bus early this month.
