Renfe is switching to buses: it will create its own company to manage alternative road transport plans

BarcelonaThe surge in investments, construction projects, and also disruptions to railway infrastructure and service interruptions across the country has dramatically increased the number of alternative road transport plans that Renfe has in place. Finding available buses at a reasonable price is no easy task when multiple problems coincide, and this has led the Spanish train operator to embark on a new project: Renfe now wants to create its own bus company to avoid relying on private providers. This was explained by spokespeople for the operator on Tuesday in a statement detailing that the tender for the new subsidiary has already been approved. Its objective is to handle all alternative road transport plans (known as PATs in railway jargon) designed for each train. In this way, Renfe will no longer have to depend on the availability of external companies and assures that it will be able to provide a "more agile" response to passengers, "with more personalized attention and a better integrated service."

Objective: to save between 9 and 13 million annually

The proposed model involves tendering a long-term framework contract (10 years, plus a 5-year extension) through a company 49% owned by Renfe and 51% by another private company. "This structure will allow Renfe to maintain a stable fleet of buses, sufficient driving staff, optimize costs, and achieve greater professionalization of management, ensuring resource availability even during peak demand," the same sources explain. Renfe, which reports to the Ministry of Transport, will allocate €61.5 million to this project and expects to achieve savings of between 10% and 15% on its bus routes, or between €9 and €13 million annually.

Until now, whenever Renfe needed to propose a road transport alternative, it had to resort to public procurement (when there was a schedule that included planned roadworks or closures) or direct contracting (in urgent or unforeseen cases). "It has been concluded that the traditional bidding model is insufficient to respond to the magnitude of the anticipated scenario," the operator explains in the statement, where it emphasizes that the shortage of available buses, the lack of drivers, and the low participation in the bidding processes were increasingly evident difficulties.

Many of the major infrastructure projects, as well as most of the problems and disruptions to the rail network, are concentrated in Catalonia. This also makes it the region with the most alternative plans underway, such as the current—unprecedented—bus service on the R3 line. However, the company maintains that, for the time being, it has not considered creating its own subsidiary within the framework of the new Cercanías de Catalunya (Catalan commuter rail network) and says that its priority now is to create a single company that "serves the entire" Spanish territory.