Catching Public Transport In NSW Is About To Get A Whole Lot More Expensive
It's the end of free Opal card travel.
One of the very few pleasures of modern life is tapping your Opal card on at the train station on a Friday morning and seeing the fare pop-up as $0. You’ve made your eight trips this week, you deserve free travel for the last couple of days. That’s how the system is supposed to work. But the good times, my friends, are now at an end.
From today the NSW government is scrapping the system of free travel for people who have made eight trips in a week. Instead, commuters will receive a 50 percent discount. While the price of a bus, train or ferry trip isn’t increasing, removing free travel is going to lead to increase transport costs for plenty of commuters. The change was recommended by the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal back in May.
Today @Sydneytranspor1 breaks their contract with users, given that the Opal “free trips after 8” was supposed to replace the weekly ticket
— Diiiiiiiii (@BartholomewD) September 5, 2016
When the Opal card was first introduced the NSW Auditor-General warned that catching public transport was likely to get more expensive for a lot of public transport users. Commuters using a monthly, quarterly or yearly public transport ticket were likely to end up paying more under the Opal card system, the Auditor-General said. But don’t worry, said the government, Opal card users would get this fancy new discount and would end up paying less overall!
The travel cost comparison website, Finder, has estimated that 67 percent of Opal users will end up paying more under the new system. According to Finder, most commuters will end up forking out an extra $562 a year.
The NSW government has disputed those figures and argued that the current system was unfair because only 30 per cent of public transport users actually received the benefit. But 30 percent of all Opal users is still a lot of people, and it’s clear that regular commuters will be hit the hardest.
#nswpol #wsroc Tony Hadchiti – abolition of free trips on Opal card “total injustice for western Sydney having to travel east for work”
— Danuta Kozaki (@danutakozaki) September 5, 2016
The changes have been slammed by NSW Labor and the Greens, who warned that increasing fares would dissuade people from catching public transport.
Everyone who catches public transport in Sydney knows how ridiculously crowded our trains and buses have become. Recent data has shown that train passenger numbers have increased 10 percent in just one year and the average load is 114 percent.
So not only is our public transport becoming more crowded, we get to pay extra for it. What a rip off.