50 Cent Fares fron the Interstate Observer

[Admet75]

Hard to turn back from the 50 Cent fare?

Admittedly I am based in Adelaide so observing what goes on interstate with public transport is an enjoyable past time as someone who is both a public transport advocate and enthusiast.
When my late grandmother was alive in 2002, we didn’t know where we wanted to go for our summer holidays as we had been to all mainland capital cities in Australia except for Darwin and Canberra and we thought why not venture out to Brisbane and experience the South East Busway and how it compared to our home-based Adelaide O-Bahn- that is a separate story in itself so I won’t bore you with that now.

Public transport fares could be considered expensive or inexpensive or cheap as chips as what that latter is in regards to the 50-cent fare.
Unfortunately, Australia’s capital city transport agencies have been quite slow in introducing integrated fares and ticketing and the first bus off at the bus stop was Adelaide and Perth. Melbourne soon followed in the 1980s, but Melbourne from the 1980s could be classified of having trouble with every new ticketing that is imposed on the general public that you wonder to yourself is that the reason people travel fare- they cannot be bothered the new ticketing system brought in or just revenge for not having conductors on trams- who knows?

When SEQ Public Transport became under one brand name in 2003 called TransLink integrated fares and ticketing became the big thing especially for Queenslanders and was something that was exciting back then and even today find it strange no timetable connections between BCC Buses and City Train services because BCC finds City train services as a competitor to its services- confused? - however this also existed when trams operated in Brisbane.

To its credit TransLink ran an excellent publicity campaign about TransLink followed on by many timetable changes in various areas including the publication and letterboxing of excellent booklets with summary frequencies and route maps highlighting the changes in those regions. Interestingly those booklets also highlighted the public transport fares with a fare zone map.

However, then TransLink introduced a South East Public Transport Directory which was map booklet that covered all of South East Queensland. Whilst the maps were schematic, they proved harder to read because in some places like the Gold Coast there was a mish-mash of services everywhere so trying to follow one route you would be confused where it did end up- today that mish-mash still continues to a certain extent. Light Rail finally sorted out some of the mish-mash.

These changes booklets have all but disappeared now and trying to get information is now relegated to the Internet and if you are not a regular user of the Internet you might find one day your bus services doesn’t exist or you miss the bus to work because you have not checked the internet.
Fares for SEQ at one time were higher than what they should have been and all of a sudden, the Queensland Government taking the heat from the voters establishing a working committee who presented what residents wanted to hear that the amount of fare zones reduce from 23 Zones in total down to only 8 zones.

This led to decrease in fares for most SEQ residents but also an increase in patronage but what didn’t help was when Covid suddenly not only decreased fare revenue but also patronage.

However, we can see the State Government as a bold election pitch has introduced 50 cent fares on SEQ and half fares on the Air Train. We know also that regional areas that are TransLink marketed.
Patronage I had heard has increased and this maybe because of the fares or that petrol prices are high and passengers are feeling the pinch.

Now returning to the devil’s advocate question and that is can public transport fares return to normal after the 6-month trial of the 50 cent fares.
Simply no politician would want to commit political suicide and return fares to previous fares otherwise they would face not only political backlash but also patronage would dramatically drop and so would customer satisfaction regarding public transport.

The only alternative that politicians really have is to increase fares steadily until it goes back to normal and that members of the public forget that they did have it lucky with a 50 cent fares. However, this is where it become interesting and that is if patronage skyrockets with the 50-cent fare, I don’t think the Queensland Government have budgeted for extra services and whilst they are purchasing more buses for rail replacement services these buses would be inadequate if say train and light rail demand increases. In other words, one six-car train set carries 560 passengers and for light rail approximately 310 passengers, these cannot fit cannot fit on one normal bus.

As we know that public transport fares are what passengers decide probably first when deciding or not whether to use public transport and then comes frequencies and coverage (this is where SEQ will have some work to play catch up in some parts).
Fares can make or break a passenger piggy back but what hurts them more is that they have to rely on the car because the public transport service does not provide them with an alternative compared to the car.

These are my thoughts what do you think?

[zto305]

Obviously the fare price is not the only factor en/discouraging people to use our public transport, but also the timetable and route coverage. We have a lot of people living in suburbs without early morning/late night bus services. While the operating time does not meet our life style, we cannot rely on public transport even if we wish to. Remember not all passengers live along the busway or go to the city. Translink just keep putting more and more empty buses on the busway, while all park and ride places are already too full. How can they attract new passengers?

[rtt_rules]

The early numbers showed around 20% more pax or something like that going by the govt FB post. A nice increase but not a huge increase and goes to show only a small portion of commuters were price sensitive to opt in to PT. Roughly the opposite happened 15 years ago when a series of 15% YoY increases reduced passenger numbers by 10 - 20% (from memory) indicating others didn't have a choice to opt out.

Maybe more might join over time, maybe some services are now simply too full to bother switching to PT but wouldn't expect much more growth in the short term which sort of demonstrates how limiting the existing RPT network is for most commuters.