307 milliárd Ft to hold train fares below cost — mostly for urban commuters.

Indoklás

This is the single largest line in the chapter: 307,000.0 millió Ft reimbursing the cost of rail passenger public service — the payment that covers the gap between what rail passengers pay in fares and what it costs to carry them. This is a different thing from the infrastructure-operation line above, and the distinction is the heart of the classification. Maintaining the track is keeping a network asset serviceable; reimbursing the passenger service is holding the fare below the cost of carriage and funding the difference from general taxation. The line is, in mechanism, a consumption subsidy: it lowers the price of one particular service — rail travel — for the people who use it, and funds the reduction from taxes paid by the whole population, including the majority who do not travel by rail or who travel on routes the subsidy does not reach. The within-class distributional pattern is worth naming. A general rail-fare subsidy of this size is not neutral across the income distribution: regular rail commuting into and between the larger towns is used more by employed, urban, and higher-income travellers than by the lowest-income households, many of whom are not commuting by rail at all; the funding, drawn from the general tax base, falls on every wage-earner including those in regions and occupations the rail network serves least. A worker in a small settlement with no usable rail service, paying SZJA and szociális hozzájárulási adó out of every month's wage, is part-funding a fare reduction for a commuter whose journey the subsidy makes cheaper. The classification is Phase-Out rather than Keep because a permanent, universal, cost-reimbursement subsidy of rail fares is not a state function the frame keeps — but it is Phase-Out rather than Immediate Cut for two reasons. First, a large number of households have arranged their lives — where they live, where they work — around the current cost of rail commuting, and an abrupt removal of the subsidy would strand that reliance. Second, the social-policy concern that a fare rise would fall hardest on genuinely low-income rail users is real, and the honest answer is not a universal price cap but a targeted mechanism — concessionary fares for low-income, elderly, student, and disabled travellers — that protects the people the universal subsidy is loosely assumed to protect, at a fraction of the cost. The six-year phase-out moves rail fares toward cost-reflective levels in steps, with the targeted concessionary scheme standing up alongside, so that the protected travellers keep a reduced fare and the general subsidy to all rail users unwinds.