Unibus, Traffic and public transport | When the wheels of the bus stop turning

Oslo’s residents can breathe a sigh of relief. For this time.

The unibus crisis has shown us how vulnerable the city has become under the current tender regime. If Unibuss had gone bankrupt, 60-70 percent of the bus service in Oslo would have been stopped overnight. 200,000 passengers had been directly affected, and 2,200 employees had not had a job to go to.

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Marit Vea is directed to stand at the back of the bus

Indirectly, the whole city would have been thrown into chaos if the buses had stopped running. Residents had not made it to work. Children and employees would not be able to get to school and kindergarten. Healthcare personnel would struggle to get to hospitals, doctor’s offices and emergency rooms. Queues on the roads would increase, and congestion on trams and subways would build up.

We had risked that emergency services that did not get there and critical community functions were put out of action. The sub-district of Bjørndal would be completely without public transport.

The most incomprehensible is that the city’s top political leader in this case, city councilor Marit Vea from the Liberal Party, is not in the driver’s seat, but is relegated to standing at the back of the bus, while two wholly owned municipal companies argue about fines and breach of contract terms.

The tender system for buses is based on ideas that the public sector should be managed as if it were a private company, so-called New Public Management. A way of running public services that gained momentum around 30 years ago. The system is designed to cut public spending to a minimum, but has clear weaknesses that become particularly apparent when crises arise. We have experienced it before, and we risk experiencing it again.

Get too low on price

According to Avisa Oslo in negotiations with Ruter, Unibuss and owner Sporveien must have admitted – and taken self-criticism for – that during the tender rounds they had set prices too low, been too optimistic and underestimated the difficulties and costs associated with the technology change to electric buses.

When the scandal in the waste company Veireno came to the surface in 2016, the city’s residents experienced that the rubbish was not collected. It piled up in port rooms and pavements all over the city as a foul-smelling reminder of the danger of the tender system. The Renovation Agency received close to 30,000 complaints during the first three months. It was discovered that several employees worked 80 hours a week, a clear violation of the Working Environment Act. The boss in Veireno was eventually sentenced to prison.

The solution was to take waste collection back under the authority of the municipality. The lesson is that critical social tasks should be under democratic political control, not be bound by legal frameworks that are primarily intended to protect the interests of commercial companies.

The dust has hopefully settled after the Unibus crisis. Now we should look up and start work on investigating the dismantling of the tender system for buses in Oslo. When the current contracts expire, Oslo municipality itself should own and operate the bus service in the city, as we already do with trams and the subway.

Read more comments, debate posts and Oslo stories on Avisa Oslo’s debate page Oslodebatten

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If this shocks the MDGs, I hope for many big and small shocks ahead

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The disaster is not whether Unibuss goes bankrupt or not. It is whether the bus drivers get enough

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We have always stood up loyally for our employers and passengers, regardless of weather, wind, virus or extra work

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It was painful to see the walker next to the bed. In my head he drove a car and went for walks