From today, the buses of the Kavadarci public transport company will not accept cash. Not on urban routes, not on suburban ones. Tickets are paid with a KA card or contactlessly with Visa and Mastercard, directly on board.

The official points for buying and topping up KA cards are the Info Centre on the town square, „Bravo nuts” by the old bus station, „Mar - Pet Makarena - Vataša” and DMD OIL Glišić. Until 31 December 2026, every purchase of a KA card with a minimum credit of 300 denars comes with a free first ride.

Why this is a good decision

Cash in public transport is a hole through which both money and data disappear. When the driver takes the fare by hand, nobody knows how many people travelled, on which line, at what hour. A cashless system produces all those numbers automatically - and that is exactly why many operators spent years finding reasons not to introduce one.

Kavadarci did it, and that deserves credit. Four sales points and a free first ride are sensible transitional measures.

And now for those left outside

There is one group of passengers for whom this decision is a different kind of news. An older man without a payment card. A child given fifty denars by their grandmother. A passenger from a suburban village who boards a bus once a week and has nowhere to top up except in Kavadarci - which is, in fact, where they are heading.

That is not an argument against the system. It is a question no statement answers: what does a person do who stops at a bus stop tomorrow with a hundred denars in hand and no card? Does the driver have any way to accept it, or does the journey simply not happen?

Four sales points, all four in Kavadarci. The suburban service, by definition, carries people who do not live in Kavadarci.

The measure that will show whether it works

The promotion runs to the end of the year, which means the company has four and a half months to count its users. If by December the number of KA cards issued covers the number of regular passengers, the transition worked.

If not - the difference will not show up in a press release but in empty seats on the routes to the villages. That is the figure worth asking for in January, and the only one that will say whether this was modernisation or a filter.