Helsinki can offer city employees free public transport for a year | News
With free public transport, Helsinki aims to increase the number of passengers to pre-Covid levels.
The city of Helsinki plans to give its employees free one-year HSL season tickets.
The city’s urban environment department proposed to the city government that it should work together with Helsinki’s transport authority HSL to investigate this possibility. The proposal was unanimously approved by the chamber this week and will go before the city council next week.
A free ticket would disturb the number of passengers
With free public transport tickets for the city’s own employees, Helsinki would aim to raise the number of passengers to the pre-Covid level.
Deputy Mayor Anni Sinnemäki The chairman of the Urban Environment Division (Green) said that the public transport situation is difficult at the moment. According to Sinnemäki, it is important to attract people to use public transport, and since the city of Helsinki is Finland’s largest employer with almost 40,000 employees, it can be a huge boon for the number of passengers.
“When gasoline and diesel are expensive and the price of food rises, it would make people’s lives easier if the employer could offer such a ticket,” Sinnemäki told Yle.
Sinnemäki suggested that the benefit should be available to all willing employees of the City of Helsinki. For example, a city dweller living in Tuusula was able to work in the center of Helsinki for free, but Sinnemäki said that the details will be clarified later.
Smoothes the pay gap
Sinnemäki also offered that the benefit of the free ticket can be seen as an employer extending a helping hand to its employees about the city’s salary issues.
When Sinnemäki said that the salary situation was not discussed at the division meeting, but according to him the ticket advantage would be a good solution.
“[The city’s] reputation as an employer has taken a pretty big hit in this salary issue. The ticket advantage is also not a bad thing from that point of view,” Sinnemäki said.
Less money from the city for HSL
HSL’s finances have been in trouble recently, but Sinnemäki explained that the city would not pay the public transport operator more money. In fact, he suggested that it might even be the other way around.
“From the point of view of the people of Helsinki, it would work so that if the city, as an employer, invested in a future travel ticket as an employee benefit, it would reduce the municipal subsidy that Helsinki would have to pay to HSL,” Sinnemäki explained.