Sagunto asks regional transport body for more buses on overcrowded Valencia line
Sagunto City Council told the Valencia Metropolitan Transport Authority (ATMV) last week that commuters are being left standing, or left behind, on overcrowded interurban buses to Valencia.
Sagunto's municipal government met last week with the Valencia Metropolitan Transport Authority (ATMV), the regional body that plans bus services around Valencia, to raise a problem residents have been reporting for months. Interurban buses to Valencia arrive full during rush hour, forcing many passengers to stand or wait for the next bus because there is no room. Mayor Dario Moreno, the city's Urban Mobility councillor Javier Raro, and municipal technical staff attended the meeting.
The council delegation explained that, despite improvements in recent years, the service still fails to meet the needs of people who travel to Valencia every day for work, study or errands. Sagunto's growing population makes the problem worse: the town has now passed 75,000 residents according to the municipal count, after adding more than 4,000 people in recent years, a figure the council cites to justify its request for more metropolitan transport.
The service in question is MetroBus line 115, part of the CV-102 Valencia-Metropolitana Nord concession. It is a regionally owned service: the ATMV plans and manages it, while a private contractor operates it. That is why the council cannot fix the overcrowding on its own, and instead channels residents' complaints through the ATMV rather than changing schedules or frequencies unilaterally.
This is not the first time the service on this corridor has been expanded. In 2025, MetroBus already reinforced the so called northern corridor and raised weekday services between Sagunto, Puerto de Sagunto (Sagunto's coastal district) and Valencia from 52 to 78 a day, according to elperiodic.com. That boost, however, has not been enough to absorb current demand, and passengers still find full buses during the busiest times, especially early morning and late afternoon. Before that expansion, in February 2023, the regional government (Generalitat) had already launched three new lines for the northern metropolitan area, two of them overnight, including a Valencia-Sagunto service running between 22:00 and 7:00, aimed mainly at night-shift workers and people returning late from the capital.
Besides asking for more frequency and capacity on the existing line, the council proposed to the ATMV that a new line be created connecting Sagunto with its industrial estates. The proposal makes sense given the state of the local economy: the PowerCo battery gigafactory (a Volkswagen Group plant) under construction in the town is expected to create 3,000 direct jobs and around 12,000 indirect ones, figures that point to a sharp rise in daily commuting to the industrial zones in coming years. A direct line would make it easier for workers without a car to reach those jobs by public transport and reduce reliance on private vehicles, an argument the council itself uses to push the ATMV to include this connection in its planning.
The Urban Mobility councillor summed up the council's position, saying it values the ATMV's willingness to listen but has a duty to pass on what users say: full buses and people left behind because there is no room. Raro argued that a city gaining economic and demographic weight needs a wider, more reliable metropolitan network, and warned that the current situation should not become normal for people travelling to Valencia.
The meeting also covered other pending matters with the ATMV, including the follow-up of Sagunto's Urban Agreement (Convenio Urbano), which both administrations manage jointly. The council has not set a timeline for expanding frequencies or for the possible new line to the industrial estates, since the final decision rests with the ATMV and the operating company, not the council itself. Meanwhile, people who take the bus every morning will keep doing so under the same conditions they are complaining about, with no set date for improvement. According to Sagunto City Council, with data from elperiodic.com and the Generalitat Valenciana on previous service reinforcements.