Without having the T-Mobilitat there is no longer a way to buy a T-Jove, the ticket that allows people under 30 years of age to use public transport unlimitedly for three months for 40 euros. What is a breakthrough in the deployment of the controversial plastic card has become a nightmare for students and regular users of T-Jove, enduring queues of more than two hours at T-Mobility service points if they want to get the ticket right away.
The long waits are visible these days at Sants station, where yesterday they opened the counter at nine in the morning and in half an hour they had distributed all the service numbers until lunchtime. It is not an isolated scene, it is also repeated in the central stations of Plaza Catalunya, Arc de Triomf and beyond. The queues multiply in Granollers, Sabadell, Terrassa...
Where there is a service point (and they add a quarantine throughout the metropolitan region), there is a queue this week. Crowds even occur in service centers that work by appointment, since the one run by the Autoritat del Transport Metropolità (ATM) itself in Granvia de l'Hospitalet, for example, does not have appointments available until the month of May. In the Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat (FGC) in Plaza Catalunya and in the TMB metro in Lesseps and Torrassa directly all the options on the calendar had been exhausted yesterday afternoon.
The demand peak coincided with the start of the school term after the Easter holidays. Many T-Jove users are students and are used to matching their quarterly validity cards with the calendars of universities and training centers. The routine of returning to the classroom is accompanied by the acquisition of the quarterly ticket and not being able to buy it in the machines is when the demand for T-Mobilitat has exceeded the capacity of the customer service to respond. Suddenly, the same staff who have been sitting idly by for many months have found countless young people on the other side of the counter. Social networks, in which many of those who carry the T-Jove in their wallets move like a fish in water, have been filled with bitter complaints.
The ATM recognizes "a certain increase in requests for face-to-face attention, especially those that do not require a prior appointment", and hides behind the lack of foresight of the students. "Many are those who, at the beginning of the year, still opted for the magnetic option and have waited until the 90 days of the ticket they had bought in January have run out to register for the new contactless validation system," they justify from the ATM.
Although the administration responsible for the deployment of T-Mobilitat has been characterized by obscurantism and a lack of communication for a long time, the truth is that this time it had deployed an intense information campaign since the end of last year, announcing that T -Jove became exclusively at T-Mobilitat from March 15. The fact that the maximum age has recently been extended from 25 to 30 years has also added new users.
The solution offered by those responsible for the project is to request the card over the Internet, which has been the formula most commonly used up to now. In the last month, without going any further, 2,815 daily users have been registered through the web and 795 in person. The problem with the virtual route is that the card takes ten business days to get home and it is not a valid solution for those affected who want to use it immediately. Another option that ATM sources recall is to register and charge with the card itself integrated into the mobile phone. In this case, the virtual title can be enabled in just a few minutes, although this option is only valid for Android users with NFC, iPhone users still do not have it available.
