Weekly train tickets to go the way of the Tcard: here we go again.
I think running the new and old systems side by side would ensure a smooth transition, but I don’t think sliding discounts should be implemented. There’s no good reason why less frequent travellers should subsidise more frequent travellers. Part of the reason why TravelTens and friends are sold at a discount to the standard fare is, I would presume, to encourage efficiency, by amortising the cost of transactions over a number of trips. (Suppose buying a $2 ticket takes 30 seconds, and we hire someone to sit there at $30/hr. You can do the maths.) With a top-up smartcard, this rationale no longer exists. In Hong Kong and Singapore, for example, individual trips are substantially cheaper than an equivalent trip in Sydney - so much cheaper that there’s no need for sliding discounts for regular users. The other problem with sliding discounts is that it reflects a narrow mentality that people should use public transport for getting from home to work and back again (thereby taking a regular route and attracting a discount), whereas public transport should be far more pervasive than that.
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Tags: hong kong, public transport, singapore, smartcard, tcard
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Discounts are used to incentivise the use of Travel Tens because they save time and costs at the point of sale and consumption: it makes busses run more smoothly.
With a smart card, this rationale no longer exists. However, for people who usually travel on Travel Tens, they should be entitled to expect that their fares should not go up. So what do you do? Make per-trip costs the same as current Travel Ten costs? But then the government seems to lose revenue, depending on the level of sophistication fo their modelling.
The NSW government is too tightarse, that’s the problem.
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Definitely, trips taken with the smart card should not cost more than using existing TravelTens etc, otherwise there would be absolutely no incentive to switch. If I were running the show, I’d consider giving smart card users a substantial discount, and once everyone’s converted, slowly raise the prices until the revenue goes back up to a reasonable level.
However, the two systems cannot run side by side forever. I pay roughly $2.10 per day for a return trip to the city from East Hills with my Flexipass - and I’d say that’s pretty much a steal. Of course I like it how it is, but I’d say it’s rather low.
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