The end of Opal card runs....

battler on 21/12/2015 - 13:46
Last edited 21/12/2015 - 14:27

Seems ipart is proposing to implement measures to kill off the loophole in Opal card use, where some of us take many short trips early in the week and get the rest of the week free.

Full details here: http://www.ipart.nsw.gov.au/Home/Industries/Transport/Public…

News and comments here: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/end-looms-for-150-million-opal-car…

Key change is:

Making weekly travel discounts fairer
by eliminating the perverse incentive for regular commuters to take unnecessary shorter trips earlier in the week to qualify for free travel on their longer and more expensive trips later in the week, costing the system more.
Under the current structure where all travel is free after 8 journeys, the 62% of passengers who travel fewer than 9 times a week are subsidising those who travel more often, costing around $150 million each year.

IPART is instead proposing a new fairer weekly travel credit arrangement which combines a weekly spending cap and frequency discounts in one scheme. The scheme is designed to reduce the subsidy going from one group of customers to another, while still protecting customers from higher weekly expenditure. Under the proposed new arrangements, passengers would pay for all their journeys as they go and get a credit at the end of the week so that they would only end up paying for their 10 longest journeys, up to a maximum of $65 a week (up from the current $60 per week).

Travel

Related Stores

Opal Card - NSW Government
Opal Card - NSW Government

Comments

    • skimp on 23/12/2015 - 11:48
      +3

      I suggest those with a Travel10 bus ticket keep 1 unused ride never to be used. This is useful to pull out when the old green ticket reader is out of order meaning you get a free ride (I have scored plenty of free rides this way). Until the day they decommission the green ticket reader, you are always eligible for a free ride in this situation. In normal circumstances where both the Opal and the green ticket readers are working, use the Opal. Just make sure you carry the Travel10 ticket with you on every bus trip. (Keep 1 ticket of each type to cover the distance you travel - MyBus1,2,3)

      • neonlight on 24/12/2015 - 20:40
        +1

        I just hope that green machine will be a while yet. And breakdowns occur alternating between green box and opal reader than you can take out whichever is "closed"

        • skimp on 25/12/2015 - 00:08

          Exactly right. Carry both types of tickets and double your chances of getting a free ride.

          I should correct my earlier suggestion of holding one each of MyBus1,2,and 3. Ideally you just need one MyBus3 to cover journeys of any distance.

        • shortgum on 25/12/2015 - 12:56
          +1

          @skimp: just question. how can you take advantage of using Travel10 if the old green ticket reader out of order?

          E.g. I once got into M90 who don't hold paper ticket. The bus guy check my travel10 and mark a cross on the Travel10 number box (10 boxes in total). The mark there count as one trip. So assume all bus driver do this you will eventually use them up. Right?

        • skimp on 25/12/2015 - 18:59

          @leehungfei: M90 is run by Transdev which is a private operator right? I think they've used the pen method instead of a green machine for a long time now. I guess in that situation use Opal. I was mainly referring to trips on Sydney Buses where there is a green machine and it is broken, because in my experience the driver waves you through without deducting a fare. A friend who is a driver for Sydney Buses has confirmed as such. I have never seen a Sydney Buses driver use a pen to mark a ticket.

  • TtiGeR on 22/12/2015 - 19:26
    +9

    The new weekend $7.20 cap is a joke. My parents will simply stop their Sunday tours. This will certainly "help" regional businesses they have been visiting.

  • DarkOz on 23/12/2015 - 06:48
    +2

    Charging for the highest journeys is the right move but capping it at 10 instead of 8 is not.

    The best part of the Opal system was capping it at 8 so a typical worker working from Monday to Friday gets a free day. It seems like they want the honeymoon period to be over sooner than later.

    BTW, the Sydney Rails system will never make a profit.

    • secondstory on 23/12/2015 - 15:26
      -1

      They should settle for 9 =]

      It would have been nice if they had charged the highest from the start too.

  • neonlight on 23/12/2015 - 07:40
    +2

    Back to driving on the road peoples! More congestion. Thank transport minister and governament. Zero improvement and make it more expensive.

    No incentive to use Opal. Buy as much paper tickets as you can.

    • scrimshaw on 23/12/2015 - 13:54
      +1

      Yeah, they keep building more houses, and more people buy it up. Smaller suburbs like the ones in Western Sydney are growing into bigger metros.

      The road infrastructure on the other hand is not being developed by the government and traffic flow is so bad in Sydney it's beginning to hurt workers productivity and the economy.

  • zman09 on 23/12/2015 - 07:41
    +1

    So by going from 8 to 10, they are increasing my fare by 15% …..

  • alikazi on 23/12/2015 - 08:53
    -2

    We'll just buy cars. The buses are late and dirty inside anyway. I requested the transport to at least put electronic bug zappers on stations in summer for the flies. They refused. What we are already paying is enough money to maintain the transport system. We will all use cars and then they will have to reduce prices so running a transport system can be financially feasible.

  • Porco Rosso on 23/12/2015 - 12:04

    If you're worse off, you should lodge feedback on the IPART website in regards to this particular report as well.
    Link

  • secondstory on 23/12/2015 - 15:20
    +1

    Thanks for the info Battler.

    Here's my opinion on the matter:

    Public transport is a service that people pay for. If people expect for service to travel further for them thus use more time for them then it would be expected that you would pay more for it. There is a reason that longer distances have higher fares, I always hear people complaining that they have to pay more to travel further (and they have to waste more time on public transport) and that it's unfair on them. Then they complain that they have to go out of their way to make these additional unnecessary trips just to pay a reasonable fare. I have heard it being called discrimination against people who live further away. I sometimes might nod along politely but won't actually agree.

    These people are exploiting the bonus free trips and pay for cheap single zone journeys but still use the expensive route. If you look at this at a large scale people are only paying for "local" services however the costs to maintain those further trips are still there. There is also an influx in service requirements for the early week when the people exploiting the system take their extra trips. Where standard services would have been ample previously they may have to pay to increase services to cater for this also.

    I have heard that public transport services (at least in QLD) run at a debt. In the end it becomes apparent that the costs to run the service aren't as sustainable (or are less profitable, depending, but who can blame them for it) when people exploit the system like this. I agree with anyone who would say that the free trips thing is broken.

    If they don't want to fix the broken rewards system and want to cover for their losses they would probably need to do something like reduce service frequency, reduce service availability, reduce service maintenance or increase fares for everyone or something like that.
    The trains are going to run all the same, but it seems there are plenty of vocal commuters who demand a higher frequency and better services.

    If they want to fix the system, someone, somewhere is going to be hurting - but it comes down to choosing who. I don't think it is a case of "who can we hurt" but "who can we definitely NOT hurt" with these changes. They wouldn't be able to precisely tell who travels when and what income/working class they are in but I'm sure they aren't maliciously trying to harm the commuting population.

    As someone who pays full fare except my final regular trip during the week it will barely change what I am paying and at least they aren't <gasp /> making us pay for everything we use. Even if they did I still wouldn't change to car because maintenance/fuel/parking costs would still be a lot higher for me and then I would have to deal with traffic and would have to spend the commute focused on the road rather than tuning out or reading (not the case for all I know).

    Pretty much, I think they could remove the reward system completely plus increase fares a little while cutting a lot of services/stations in a lot of areas and it wouldn't make all that big a change to the number of people commuting and would reduce costs and make them more profitable - but they don't.

    • Porco Rosso on 23/12/2015 - 18:21
      +7

      For me, I used to buy quarterly tickets and before that the tickets where you could specify from a certain date to a certain date. I would start the date from a Monday and then go up to a Friday after 13 weeks or Thursday if Friday was a public holiday or I was going to have a day off. It used to work out around $25 (rounded) per week for me. Then they forced Opal on us. The comparison they showed us was that a single fare on paper ticket cost us a lot more than the opal (with weekly fare divided by 10). However it was comparing apples for apples in the first place. Also regular commuters would rarely buy single tickets!

      After switching to Opal it used to cost me $37 (rounded) a week for 8 paid journeys (and 2 free journeys on Friday). This changed to $40 (rounded) a week when a sneaky rate rise came in earlier this year. That in itself is quite a price rise for me. Especially that they fooled people by saying that they'll be making savings! The ethics of selling or forcing opal on people was wrong. They were saying that people would save more money, this is what I have a problem with! I did write letters and emails when they were introducing and luring people onto Opal and when they were trialling opal on the Bondi Junction line. I tried to oppose it but I'm guessing my letters ended up in rubbish, never heard anything.

      Raising fares isn't a problem, you'd expect that as you mentioned in your post. But then the service would be expected to improve which is not happening at all. We lag behind so much compared to some Asian or European nations when it comes to public transport and our public transport is so expensive compared to them. While service is not improving and the fares are on the rise by quite a bit (salaries are not rising either which is another problem). Although my biggest peeve is that they mask the fare rises by saying people will be saving money or making the system better.

      I'd like to have free transport like they have in many places in Europe :)

      EDIT: If this particular proposal from IPART went ahead, my weekly travel cost would be close to $50 which would be near double of what I paid on paper tickets!

      • Porco Rosso on 23/12/2015 - 20:01

        Meant to say, "it was not comparing apples for apples in the first place."

      • secondstory on 24/12/2015 - 13:42
        -2

        I can't speak for Opal or the transport system in the region of use, but I use the QLD equivalent frequently which - by the sounds of it - holds the exact same circumstances. I used to get seasonal tickets as well and pay a lot less but services were significantly worse/older back then.

        When a fare increases and you don't see an improvement to your services they are likely trying to cover losses a bit better to make the system more sustainable or services have improved or increased elsewhere. Qld has many dissatisfied Gold Coast line commuters who can pay close to $30 per one way trip twice daily via the opal equivalent. However, overtime they increased services for that specific line and they were much better off. Costs for the company increased and possibly contributed to higher fares for myself but I saw no change to my services.

        Sometimes companies have to make the decision to cut over to new technologies. The transition is often complicated and grainy, but these decisions are made generally for the better. The old ticket system was getting so out dated and devices would fail more often but because the market is moving away from those technologies, then there is less support for parts/maintenance which can and will actually end up costing more in the long run if they try to hold onto it.

        Instead they foot the bill to cut over to a new system and phase out the old one. The new one is going to cost a lot of money also, so this is reflected in immediate higher costs. Because it is still costing them to maintain the old paper system during cut-over they have both costs to take care of. Since they want to "encourage" people to move to the electronic system sooner, when all fares are increased to try accommodate for these costs, electronic costs were set to lower than paper costs as part of a not so explicit "adoption discount". This is the "saving" being mentioned. You pay less on card than you would for the paper. The increases are also possibly trying to cover the costs of ongoing implementation of the new card systems in areas you don't know about but it is all part of the network that provides services that you use.

        Indeed I did have the sentiment that raising fares isn't a problem. Your fares are being "raised" due to the changes to the "loyalty" rewards where the reward is being modified in a way that the same usage will return less rewards. It could be that it was more recently found that the original reward was resulting in too high a loss to manage. This is probably due to the fact that when the numbers were originally worked out, the people actually doing the maths/statistics in the background did not expect the exploitation of people cutting such large fares when they recommended it (people who should have been paying for 20 zones 8 times a week were only paying for 1 zone trips.. but that 20 zone line was still incurring costs to run/maintain). Pretty much from what I can see was it was the very large handful of people exploiting the system that have ruined it for the rest of us. In order to make up for losses incurred during the first one the new rewards system (although fixed) will not be as rewarding as it's predecessor.

        I barely travel overseas so I don't actually know what it's like over there myself, but from what I hear most of those countries don't have the amazing health care, educational, pharmaceutical, disability, homeless and dv sheltering, pension, community and family assistance benefits/systems/schemes that we have in Australia :) our public dollars are spent elsewhere and I don't mind that - rather, I am am proud of that fact. (Although yes, it does also go towards funding other things that I don't appreciate as much, but I guess we can't always have everything).

        Yes, other places have better things than us sometimes.. but then why not just go live there instead of here? Because there is something here for us also that makes it better for us individually that we haven't all left for a better public transport system and better internet just yet.

        • fusion17 on 24/12/2015 - 22:59
          -1

          …so you're saying deal with it or leave the country. lol.

          Thats alot of text and personal opinion from someone who: doesnt use the service in question, doesn't travel overseas to know better.

        • Porco Rosso on 05/01/2016 - 21:20
          +1

          You are right about public dollars spent on many other things (healthcare, social welfare, etc) and things like healthcare are good over. But you have to consider that the tax we pay here is a LOT higher too! So overall, we pay our taxes for a higher standard of life and we do get that with a good healthcare, education and welfare system but we do not get enough with the public transport. That's just my opinion and I guess we all are entitled to our own opinions :)

        • secondstory on 07/01/2016 - 14:50
          -1

          @toshin:

          It was a question not a statement.

          But I guess that people who aren't completely and directly involved can't have personal opinions or type a lot.

          You're probably are the type who wouldn't vaccinate your kids either.

  • suti on 24/12/2015 - 07:47
    +1

    IPART really has got it in for NSW residents. First Council mergers, now this. The Baird Government is starting to act like dictators who don't listen to the people. Now is the time for a credible opposition to stand up.

  • Herre on 24/12/2015 - 12:17

    Did you notice that - SMH closed the comments of this new…..

  • [Deactivated] on 24/12/2015 - 19:43

    A lot of complaining here…

    So yeah. WHAT ARE WE ACTUALLY GOING TO DO ABOUT IT BESIDES COMPLAIN ON THE INTERNET?

    • neonlight on 24/12/2015 - 20:36

      Nothing because you got no power over transport minister and his minions

      • [Deactivated] on 25/12/2015 - 18:00

        Well that's helpful!

        So let us continue ranting, what else can we do?! raa raa raa…

  • kronicmacstigator on 25/12/2015 - 12:28

    Only in Australia could you blame people for catching public transport…

    • neonlight on 25/12/2015 - 21:48

      You mean not catching public transport when it's always late and expensive and no incentive to do so… I can't blame anyone not to catch it

      • kronicmacstigator on 26/12/2015 - 19:16

        I worked out that for two people (one on concession) could drive a prius to the local shops and back (10km's each way) for $7.80 cheaper than it would be to catch the bus here!

  • r3ckless on 06/01/2016 - 15:59
    +1

    I ended up buying a car since Opal was introduced.

    It was costing me around $50/week for a multi. I use bus and trains for work.

    The day was this:

    bus from house to station - 5.5km distance

    train station to station - 6-8 stops

    As above twice a day for returning home.

    Now with Opal card that is;

    2 x bus - $7.00 total
    2 x train - $9.00 total

    Total cost per day is $16/day

    the 8 trips, and rest free doesnt work for me as I drive to another office mid week.

    I felt really ripped off that the bus trip was pretty expensive. As I needed a car to drive to other office, I figured I might drive to station instead of the bus. As my car uses 6.0 litres / 100km, and the station I now drive to is 10km away. That is a driving trip of 80km/week. Thus it uses 4.8litres/80km at a cost of $1.50 per litre, that is $7.20 per week in fuel.

    How much cheaper is it driving to the station as opposed to catching the train. Essentially one day of catching buses is almost as much as the amount of fuel I use for a week of driving. I know I have to fork out money to buy the car, rego/insurance, however I needed a car for weekends anyways, so those types of expenses were to be excluded in my calcuation. Public transport is a joke in NSW/AUS~

    • furyou on 22/01/2016 - 22:47

      Exactly. The transport sites try to put the rego/insurance into the commute cost, but sorry I pay those whether I drive or it sits in the garage. Yet IPART are stupid and believe those and think everyone is stupid to believe it too.

      Forget the cost, how about the services that are late or don't turn up? Time = $

  • furyou on 22/01/2016 - 22:45

    So we went from any length tix to annual + quarterly (no more start/end tix on long weekends or xmas hols)
    Cheap annual tix to annual tix that cost 4x quarterly
    Quarterly to 30-40% more expensive Opal (oh but Berk says try it out, you may be surprised) The only way to make it close to the old Quarterly price was to do 2 extra short trips on Mon/Tue.
    We lost weekly tix for those who don't start work on Mon.

    Now, oh we have to raise paper tix by 40% cuz it costs more than Opal. (Oh, why did you make Opal 40% more than my paper tix then?)
    Cut services to force opal use.

    And now the whinge about subsidise, and to fix that we increase the cost of short trips?
    We subsidise long trip users already by heaps, and this will do it more.
    Discourage using transport for short trips. Why bus to shops for $3 when driving costs 10c fuel and saves me 30min wait?

  • Donaldhump on 23/01/2016 - 03:35

    prices in qld make sydney look cheap, it is literally cheaper to drive here.

  • RoseJJ on 07/02/2016 - 23:24

    In stead of complaining in here, why dont your guys lodge the submission to the IPART website?
    I think the link for the public transport review has been closed on 5 Feb 16 but I still lodge on this website anyway.
    Link is here http://www.ipart.nsw.gov.au/Home/For_Consumers/Having_your_s…

  • [Deactivated] on 19/03/2016 - 19:33
    +3

    One of the hacks has been closed. Changes coming 21 March 2016

    https://www.reddit.com/r/sydney/comments/4b2cyl/crackdown_on…

    Under the new “break of journey” business rules the following changes have been made:

    •Customers travelling on trains, light rail, bus and ferries will now be able to “break their journey” up to 7 times on the same mode of transport. If they resume their journey on each occasion within 60 minutes, it will be considered 1 overall journey for the purposes of the Weekly Travel Reward.

    •Train and Light Rail Customers who “break their journey” will now be able to resume their journey, within 60 minutes on the same mode of transport, at one of the 9 closest station or 9 closest light rail stops (“as the crow flies” straight-line distance) to where they Tapped Off.

    • fickre on 20/03/2016 - 23:49

      Yeah, i hope opal runners are aware of this. It's not even publicly advertised. So anyone do the running on Monday morning will be dissappointed.
      I revert back to take 60 minutes apart bus trip. It takes me half a day to finish it.

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