singapore

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.