Public Road Transportation Up 15 Percent in Nine Months

A total of 76 million passengers used public means of road transportation during the current Iranian year’s first nine months (March 21-Dec. 21, 2021), registering a 15% rise compared with the similar period of last year, latest report released by the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development shows.
The highest record in nine-month public road transportation traffic over the last 10 years was registered in the fiscal 2011-12 with 177 million passengers. This is while Covid-19 pandemic is the main reason behind this year’s decline. 
The ministry aims to raise the figure to 115 million passengers by the end of the current fiscal year (March 20). 
Some 92 million people used public road transportation in the last Iranian year (March 2020-21). 
The pandemic had a big impact on global public transport, as many countries advised citizens to use public transport only when necessary. As a result, passenger numbers have fallen drastically and transport services were reduced. The provision of a reasonable service to the much smaller number of fare-paying passengers has incurred huge losses.
Protective measures such as obligatory mask-wearing and spacing of passengers were introduced, and ventilation and disinfection measures have been implemented. Protection required passengers and operators to make many changes to the way they operated and behaved.
Researchers investigated safe ways of public transport during the Covid-19 pandemic. A study found that mandatory facemasks and social distancing can allow for relatively safe public transport during the pandemic, reducing infection rates by 93.5% and 98.1% in tracking-based simulations of common contemporary forms of public transport during congestion peak-hours.