Without having the T-Mobilitat there is no longer any way to buy a T-Jove, the title that allows people under 30 to use public transport unlimitedly for three months for 40 euros. What is a breakthrough in the deployment of the controversial plastic card has turned into a nightmare for students and regular T-Jove users, who have had to endure queues of more than two hours at the attention points of the T-Mobility to get the ticket on the spot.
The long waits are visible these days at the Sants station, where yesterday they opened the counter at nine in the morning and in half an hour they had given out all the helpline numbers until lunchtime. It is not an isolated scene, it is also repeated in the central stations of Plaça Catalunya, Arc de Triomf and beyond. Queues are multiplying in Granollers, Sabadell, Terrassa… Where there is a point of care (and there are forty of them throughout the metropolitan region), this week there is a queue. Agglomerations are created even in the attention centers that work by appointment, since the one of the Autoritad del Transport Metropolità (ATM) in Granvia de l’Hospitalet, to give an example, does not have appointments available until May. On the Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat (FGC) in Plaça Catalunya and on the TMB metro in Lesseps and Torrassa, all the calendar options had been sold out yesterday afternoon.
The peak in demand has coincided with the start of the school term after the Easter holidays. Many T-Jove users are students and tend to match their quarterly validity cards with university and training center calendars. The routine of returning to the classroom is accompanied by the acquisition of the quarterly ticket and when they have not been able to buy it from the machines is when the demand of T-Mobilitat has exceeded the ability to respond to it on the part of the attention service Suddenly, the same staff who for many months have been standing idly by have found countless young people on the other side of the counter. Social networks, in which many of those who carry T-Jove in their wallets move like fish in water, have been filled with bitter complaints.
The ATM recognizes “a certain increase in requests for face-to-face care, especially in those areas that do not require an appointment”, and takes refuge in the students’ lack of foresight. “There are many who, at the beginning of the year, still opted for the magnetic option and have waited until the 90 days of the degree they bought in January have run out to register in the new contactless validation system”, they justify from the ATM, which coordinates the attention through the different operators involved.
Although the administration responsible for the deployment of T-Mobility has been characterized by obscurantism and lack of communication for a long time, the truth is that this time it had deployed an intense information campaign since the end of the year past, and had announced that the T-Jove was going to be exclusively in the T-Mobilitat format from March 15.
The solution offered by those in charge of the project is to order the card via the internet, which has been the formula mostly used until now. In the last month, without going any further, 2,815 new daily users were registered via the web and 795 in person. The problem with the virtual route is that the card takes ten working days to arrive at home and is not a valid solution for those affected who want to use it immediately.
Another option recalled by ATM sources is to register and load the same card integrated into the mobile phone. In this case it is possible to enable the virtual title in just a few minutes, but this option is only valid for Android users with NFC, iPhone users do not have it available yet.
