Effective, Tuesday 6th September, fares on public transport routes in the Dominican Republic using tollbooths will increase by Dominican $5 in response to the increase in highway tolls imposed by the Danilo Medina regime.

He said that the problem was that if a driver charged Dominican $30 and had five passengers, two full fares would go towards paying the toll. If there were only one or two passengers on board, the driver would have to borrow the money to pay the toll.

Marte said that the measure could be provisional as the public transport drivers were open to discussions aimed at preventing fare increases.

Nevertheless, he said that the government did not need to increase the tolls as they only needed Dominican $5 on each gallon of fuel to maintain the roads.

The toll increase went into effect on Monday 5th September 2016 and in many cases doubled the cost of the tolls.