Patrons of commercial transport will from today enjoy a 15.3% reduction in fares.
This decision was announced last week by the transport operators and follows the reduction in prices of fuel at the various pumps.
Industry players had called on transport operators to reduce their fares because prices of fuel had gone down.
Government held a number of meetings last week over the issue.
The industrial relations officer for the Ghana Private Road Transport Union (GPRTU), Abass Imoro in an interview with Citi News said the union’s resolution to reduce fares is on compassionate grounds and not solely the outcome of their meeting with the government.
“We considered reducing lorry fares because of the reduction in fuel prices. We thought it wise to reduce it to 15 percent which we strongly believe will be a Christmas bonus to all our clients.”
Mr Imoro explained that: “The Transport Ministry was expecting more than what we have just come out with, and we were also not prepared to go by their demand. This is because, we demonstrated to them that as we speak, there is a very big deficit between the fuel increment from some period up to now and the lorry fares that we also charged from that period up to now, so the passengers are also owing us a lot but what can we do? The passengers are our relatives, so we had to do whatever we had to do to sanitize the relationship between us. So we have decided to decrease lorry fares by 15.3 percent effective December 19.”
Touching on the longevity of the reduction, he said “the price of lorry fares will remain reduced but if they [the Government] come out tomorrow and increase the fuel price to an extent where we have to change the lorry fares, why won’t we change ours too?”
He was also optimistic that their members will comply with the new fare directive.