In 2017, students had to pay €29.1 million of fines. These fines are given for using their student public transport rights while they are not students anymore. The number of students that do this is quite large, because it takes quite some effort to stop the traveling subscription. This results in the troubling fact that the majority of the students that have to pay these fines did not do this on purpose. Clearly something has to change.
Therefore, after many organisations and researches addressed this issue, minister Van Engelshoven of Education wrote a letter to the House of Representatives. In this letter she demanded that students will not get fined anymore if they can prove they did not travel with the subscription after ending their studies. However, the students that continue traveling will get higher fines. This law would be changed on the 1st of January 2019.
However, the perfect solution is to automatically stop the subscription, even though this is very costly. Unfortunately, they will probably implement the modifications above and they will expand the blacklist of card numbers. So, if you keep traveling with the card or subscription, your card will automatically deactivated.
Hopefully, this will lower the fines you will receive. Besides, we hope they will give some insight in where our money goes and this will be a step in a better system.