Skopje without private buses again: 40 minutes of waiting in Volkovo, line 23 nowhere to be seen for over an hour

Tuesday morning, 6:15 am, Volkovo. People are waiting for a bus. At 6:47 one finally leaves - a JSP bus from Sredselo towards Lepenec. More than 40 minutes of nothing. "Looks like the private operators aren't running today," one resident wrote in the local social media group, with advice for the neighbours: "Leave earlier if you don't want to be late."

Volkovo was no exception. In Čento people waited in vain for lines 45 and 23, run by private operators, then walked to other stops and were late for work. Passengers on line 23 say they waited more than an hour. At the Railway Station, lines 5, 15a and 27 went by so packed that people physically couldn't get on. In Topansko Pole, residents complain that the private number 9 doesn't follow its set route and doesn't stop at every stop.

The script is an old one

There is no official explanation for Tuesday's chaos so far. But passengers already know the script. In June 2025 the private operators stopped running for two days, claiming the public transport company JSP owed them over 150 million denars, and came back once part of the debt was paid. In October of the same year they cut their hours to 5 to 10 am, again over unpaid obligations, that time 90 million denars. In February this year some of the private buses couldn't set off because of a fault in the GPS validators.

The City of Skopje won't answer whether anyone actually monitors the work of the private operators - who are part of public transport under contract and have to follow the timetable - or whether and for how many months they are owed money. The two questions are linked. If the operator isn't paid, it stops. If it is paid and still doesn't run, then the contract isn't worth the paper it's written on. The passenger isn't a party to that dispute, but they're the one standing at the bus stop.

The opposition SDSM seized on the situation for a sharp statement against Mayor Orce Gjorgjievski, claiming that "citizens wait 40 minutes at a stop" and that last year's announcements of extra buses "remained announcements". The political back-and-forth will continue. Winter, meanwhile, will come no matter who is right, and with it the snow at the bus stops. Will anyone by then say publicly how much JSP owes to whom, and who fines those who don't run as the contract requires?