translated from Spanish: Transantiago Expert Panel: “It’s impossible to think of a hike in several months”

Juan Pablo Moreno, president of the Panel of Experts that calculates the transantiago fares, said that in the current scenario of the international decline in the price of oil, it is highly unlikely that the interested public transport tariff will be able to rise in the coming months.
Moreno told El Mercurio that the historic fall in crude oil worldwide is good news, as “costs will have an additional and very strong fall.”
“Surely the rates will stand, it is impossible to think of a hike in several months. Prices, demand, a lot of things would have to be recovered for that. The scenario in the coming months is a stable rate,” the economist added.
In this way, the lower price of oil would lower costs, which in turn would offset the lower revenue that system operators have had in recent time, due to restrictive measures (quarantine and curfew) by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Carlos Melo, an academic at San Sebastian University, told the morning that “oil is an important input, but the rest of the costs have to continue to be paid and you can’t adjust much, especially companies that have seen losses.”
It should be recalled that the Government should have twice frozen the rise of the Transantiago, as it was one of the causes that led to the social outburst of last October.
Similarly, by law the fare of capital public transport cannot decrease, since the current system is subsidized by the State.

Original source in Spanish