Tehran Mayor's Reaction to "Sleeping Bus" News: We Don't Charge
Two Tehran municipality officials reacted to the publication of a report about the phenomenon of "sleeping buses" among the capital's homeless, calling it exaggerated details.
On Thursday evening, Tehran Mayor Alireza Zakani, in response to homeless people "spending the night" on express buses, said he was asking those affected to visit the municipality's hothouses, which are open in various areas of Tehran.
Expressing his ignorance of the reason why homeless people do not visit the shelters, he added that the Tehran Municipality cannot "forcibly" transfer these people to the shelters and that any coercion in this regard requires a legal order.
The mayor of Tehran has also denied receiving payment for the sleeper bus.
These words are being spoken in a situation where, in addition to the very small capacity of the shelters, there are no accurate and official statistics on the number of homeless people in Tehran.
According to Tejarat News, unofficial statistics show that in 2019, the number of homeless people in the capital was between 14,000 and 15,000, while a Tehran municipality official announced in November this year that the capacity of the capital's shelters would only reach "two thousand people."
In this context, the CEO of the Tehran Municipality Bus Company has also said that the existence of the phenomenon of sleeping on buses cannot be denied, but "this phenomenon is not as severe as stated in the report."
Mahmoud Tarfa's reference is to a report published on the "Tojarat News" website on Wednesday, January 28. According to this field report, some people living in the capital are sleeping on express buses at night due to their inability to pay their rent.
The cost of spending a night on the Rapid Transit (BRT) buses in Tehran is 12,000 to 25,000 Tomans. This amount works out to about 360,000 to 750,000 Tomans per month for a person on a sleeper bus.
The publication of this report sparked a wide wave of reactions on various social networks, once again raising the issue of the excessive increase in housing rents in Tehran and its suburbs among cyberspace users and civil activists.
Source: Radio Farda
