The new problem of BRT dreams; "You have to get off at 4 am"

Three weeks after the media reported on the prevalence of sleeping buses for citizens unable to pay their rent in Tehran, reports indicate that, based on the new decision, people who spend the night on "sleeping buses" are being forcibly removed from them at "four in the morning."

Ahmad Ahmadi Sadr, CEO of Tehran Municipality Welfare Organization, recently announced the deployment of 20 buses across Tehran for sleeper buses, but the news website "Tojarat News" wrote on Tuesday, January 18, that "they say they have to get off these buses at 4:00 a.m. Then they have to buy tickets again and take refuge on the buses of the Vahed Company until the bitter cold passes."

Tehran City Council members had previously criticized why these people "don't go to the hothouses," but Tejarat News wrote in a field report that the bus sleepers are people "with clean clothes who can't afford to rent a house," and they told this media outlet's reporter that "the hothouse is not hygienic. It has a dirty environment. We even went to the hothouse several times to sleep, but we couldn't go there because it was so dirty."

Bus drivers also told Tejarat News that "the hothouse environment is not good for those who are not addicted and have a healthy lifestyle."

However, following the publication of news about the sleeper bus, Mehdi Chamran, the head of Tehran City Council, on January 25 reduced the issue to the situation of addicts and hothouses, saying that "some addicts don't feel like going to hothouses."

He and other officials also strongly criticized the coverage of the sleeper bus news in Persian-language media abroad.

While the Central Bank of Iran has announced that rents in Tehran and its suburbs have increased by more than 50 percent, field reports from the capital indicate that some people are sleeping on express buses at night due to their inability to pay their rent.

According to reports, the cost of spending a night on a rapid transit bus (BRT) in Tehran is 12,000 to 25,000 tomans. This amounts to about 360,000 tomans per month for a person on a sleeper bus.

Source: Radio Farda