After four months of suffering with the public city transport, Skopjes can breathe a sigh of relief, there is hope that the situation will normalize, which would mean that there will be more buses and that the pushing in the vehicles will decrease.

Today, the private carriers and the City of Skopje finally reached an agreement regarding the payment of the debt and the re-engagement of the private carriers in public transportation.

 We finally have an agreement with the City of Skopje, we have agreed all the details, from the payment of the JSP debt of 1,5 million euros, to the release of public calls - said Jovica Zafirovski, who leads the negotiations with the City on behalf of the private carriers.

He informed at today's press conference that public calls for all lines will be announced on Friday or Monday.

We will all register for that public call, there is no reason not to register, the conditions suit us. We expect that we will start work by the 20th of this month - said Zafirovski.

According to the agreement, three public calls should be published, i.e. three packages that will cover all lines, however, with a new redistribution, and they will call on the announcements with new companies, and not organized through "Sloboda Vraves" and "Makeexpress" .

However, for everything that was discussed today, there is no written agreement, but the intentions of the mayor Danela Arsovska and the City of Skopje were presented orally to the carriers.

Regarding the obsolescence of some of the buses, Zafirovski said that the entire list of buses has been submitted to the City of Skopje and that the mayor expressed her willingness to subsidize them in that part.

Private carriers ceased to be part of the city's public transport in November 2022 due to debts that they demanded to be paid by the City of Skopje. In late November and early December, more than 300 buses parked at key intersections blocked the capital. Because of that, their contracts for transportation were terminated, and the mayor refused to meet and talk with them, until a new negotiating team was formed, and the director of "Sloboda Vravoz", Lenin Jovanovski, was thrown out of the "game".

Then the City of Skopje did not even admit that there is any debt to the transporters, but the control of the IRS and other competent institutions determined that money is still owed to them.

In the past months, after the private carriers stopped driving, JSP tried with its buses to cover the lines on which the private carriers used to drive. How successfully he did it, as claimed by the management of JSP and Arsovska, was shown by the daily picture on the streets of Skopje - crowded bus stations, crowded vehicles and too few buses.

The city of Skopje tried to correct the situation by publishing two public announcements seeking carriers on five lines, but due to the fact that a meeting with them to discuss the settlement of the debt was repeatedly refused, not a single carrier responded to the announcements. Now finally, there is hope that the situation with the carriers will be resolved.