A civic initiative called “We’re against the metro fare increase” will be gathering in English Park (next to the Sundukyan State Academic Theatre of Yerevan) on Jul. 18 at 11 am.<\/p>\n
Campaign organizers are urging the public to join them and write different inscriptions having to do with the subway on their shirts; for example, “We’re against the metro fare increase,” “Give us back our change,” and “Old metro, old fare.”<\/p>\n
“If there are designers, artists, help us create stencil templates,” say organizers.<\/p>\n
According to them, demonstrators will wear the shirts on Jul. 22 during a march to city hall, stopping at the Armenian government building and metro stations along the way, where they will hand over their second letter.<\/p>\n
Recall, the one-way fare for riding the metro in the Armenian capital doubled on Jul. 1: the previous fare of 50 drams is now 100 drams (about $0.27 USD), in line with other modes of public transport such as buses, trolley buses and minibuses (commonly known as \u201cmarshrutkas\u201d).<\/p>\n
On the same day, about two dozen residents protested the fare hike outside city hall, handing over a letter to Yerevan mayor Karen Karapetyan, asking him to review his decision.<\/p>\n
As previously reported<\/strong><\/span><\/a>, Yerevan mayor Karen Kareptyan responded to the public\u2019s concerns by publishing a note on his Facebook pag<\/span><\/strong>e<\/a>: \u201cI understand your concerns on raising the metro fare. By not taking this step, we would have endangered all the necessary conditions for ensuring the operation of the subway.<\/p>\n \u201cLet me also note that the 100 drams fare [for public transportation] remains the lowest fare among CIS cities. I hope you will approach this issue with understanding,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n According to figures cited by the mayor, 20 million passengers use the Yerevan metro annually, which is 5\u20136% of public transport passengers in the Armenian capital. The allocation to the Yerevan metro from the state budget last year comprised 1 billion 845 million drams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A civic initiative called “We’re against the metro fare increase” will be gathering in English Park on Jul. 18 at 11 am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107733,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[65942,13935,29451,29450,27483,29766,29767,10355],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113658"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}