The TIB is no longer for 'tourists'

Bauzá's government included a section on the TIB website called ‘Tourism on public transport’. It promoted 39 tourist routes in six languages and with a video. Visitors should know that they could travel easily and cheaply all over Mallorca and discover beaches, heritage, hiking, and nature.

Eleven years ago, the island's public intercity bus had nine million annual passengers. Of these, 75% (about 6.5 million) were tourists. The rest, residents.

A decade later, it reached almost 30 million passengers. 68% were residents. The terms have been reversed and this cannot be solely attributed to free travel for locals. Before, the TIB was a thing for tourists and a desperate option for those who could not travel by car, on an island where everything was done by driving. Now there are reports that these tourists – whom it was not so difficult to ignore – have embraced Spanish cunning and are using resident cards to occupy public transport seats without paying a euro.

The President of the Government, Marga Prohens, has stated that they are studying the case, which is the same as trying to put doors on the field when the problem is not the fraud of clever foreigners but that of overcrowding. A problem she has preferred to stifle in theatrical and inoperative sustainability pacts until it is obscured. Meanwhile, we are all entertained with the soap opera of the cars of the vice-president of the Consell de Mallorca, Pedro Bestard, another insulting metaphor of privilege in front of the common people.

It would not be bad to fight against fraud and expose them with exemplary fines for offenders, but it will not happen and it would not solve the underlying problem either. A driver with no time even to pee, dealing with a crowd of angry passengers, will start asking for ID? What we have is not more awareness about the environmental impact of private vehicle use, but thousands of people who have fled housing prices in the city and who survive by saving on gasoline (and traffic jams) to pay avaricious landlords who squeeze them with rents or pay mortgages for flats bought at exorbitant prices. Among many other causes.

And to think that only ten years ago the bus was promoted among tourists so that we could go by car... Now the roads (in addition to the TIB) are also theirs. And what awaits us.