Letschert does not want to abolish public transport fines for students

The ministry of Education doesn’t intend to scrap public transport fines for students. The idea sounds sympathetic, said the minister of Education, Rianne Letschert, but it would create too much work for study financing organisation DUO.

In a debate about higher education, opposition party PRO raised questions about the fines for (former) students who travel on with an invalid student travel product.

In 2025, 30,000 students together paid 5.6 million euros in fines, the Higher Education Press Agency reported on Wednesday. It costs these students 96 euros per half month, or 192 euros per month. In the second month that fine is doubled.

Automatically stop

Many students forget to remove the travel product from their card or assume it happens automatically. Politicians have wanted the travel product to be stopped automatically for years, but that would not be technically possible.

Soon it will be technically possible and yet it still will not happen. DUO waits a month, so students still run into fines if they are not careful.

There is an alternative: you could charge the trip price instead of imposing a fine. Fatihya Abdi asked education minister Letschert questions about that during a committee debate on higher education and DUO.

Decreased

But the minister is already satisfied that the fine is lower than before. “Thanks to various measures, the public transport fines have already decreased by 90 percent in the past ten years”, she said.

Besides, changing the system would create a lot of work for DUO. Letschert: “The idea of charging the trip price as a public transport fine sounds sympathetic, but it has enormous implementation consequences for DUO”, she said without further explanation.

Her final counterargument was striking: she doesn’t want to put costs on students. There may be (former) students who travel so much by public transport that they would pay more than 96 euros in trip prices in two weeks. For such travellers, the fine would therefore be cheaper than the trip price, the minister reasons.

Or as she put it: “Besides that, it could also be disadvantageous to students who’d have to pay more for tickets than a half month public transport fine would cost.”

Stop online

In the new payment system for public transport, OVpay, students can stop their travel product online. That no longer needs to be done at a ticket machine, as is currently the case. The number of fines is expected to fall further as a result.

“I see that as one of the most important upcoming measures to bring the fines down as much as possible”, said Letschert, who would rather keep the fines.