this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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If you tag off by 7:15am, train journeys are free.
About the only time I needed a very short trip was zipping around the CBD on a tram. And such a trip is free. For the record, it's also much faster than walking, plus the trams are frequent and on almost every main street in the grid.
I'm glad this particular problem has been fixed. It was a stupid policy.
It's $16.80 plus whatever your fare is. If you've already paid $17 to use the network for the day, this is a pretty hefty hike on top of that charge. As for going to the airport more than once a week, I'm not sure how common that is. Most people only go there once.
No argument on the SkyBus thing. That service is an embarrassment to a city the size of Melbourne.
As an aside, I'm actually in Perth. Our trains hold their own with either city, though we lack the network coverage of Melbourne or Sydney. Our present government is working to address this, though.
Our tickets kick both your arses. You can buy a cash ticket anywhere here as a tourist, the max you'll pay is $5 for the day. Including the trains to/from the airport. It's $4 daily cap if you have a SmartRider. If you are only going on a one-way trip, it's something like $3. Transport in the CBD is free, Melbourne stole that idea off us.
Opal isn't only cheaper for very short trips. It's cheaper than the $5 Myki minimum fare for most off-peak trips within Sydney, and for most bus trips.
The free tram zone isn't much use unless you either drive or walk to the CBD in the first place - if you travel in by public transport, you've already paid for a time-based fare anyway. If you walk to the CBD, you're probably fit enough that walking within the free tram zone is faster anyway. So it only really benefits the people who drive.
All the people working at the airport make multiple trips to the airport every week. They're the people who'd be most affected by the surcharge if there was no weekly cap. Tourists are traveling to the airport infrequently anyway.
Last time I was in Perth was a few years ago now, but you could only get a smart card ticket if you were a resident. There was no way to get one as a tourist, and NFC credit card payment wasn't supported, either. I hope they've fixed that. The airport bus was cheap, but infrequent. Same with the trains - there was always a lot of waiting.
You can avoid the airport train surcharge in Sydney by catching the 350 or 420 buses. You can also avoid SkyBus in Melbourne by catching the bus to Broadmeadows, although it's a bit of a walk from the main terminals, and it's infrequent, and Broadmeadows isn't exactly a central location.
You keep saying off-peak. Unfortunately, those fares don't help me much. Like most people, I use public transport to get to/from work. The definition of peak travel.
I would have hoped that workers had an exemption to the station access fee. Surely the ones who drive don't have to pay $60 a day to park, right?
Not really. You probably caught something into town in the morning, and that ticket would be expired. They only last 2-3 hours. So, you caught a train in the morning, you buy another one to go home. At lunch, your tram trip across to your lunch spot is free.
Perth works exactly the same way, only with busses.
Whoever told you this was wrong. You can get one at just about any newsagent, as well as a few Transperth locations in major train and bus stations. I don't know whether you can get one at the airport, but i hope you can.
This is still unreliable. Train ticket machines should be able to handle your phone, but busses don't. Busses barely support cash (they only have a few dollars change).
Not how Melbourne works. As soon as you go over two hours, it bumps you to the all- day fare. So you went into the city, over two hours later you used a tram in the CBD and you're bumped up to the daily fare, you went home more than two hours later and you wouldn't get charged again. The free tram zone makes no difference because you're paying the daily fare whether the trip in the middle is nominally "free" or not.
It wasn't possible to buy them like that last time I visited (which, as I said, it's years ago now). You needed to order one with a Perth residential address. I guess it must have been during the initial rollout that they were limiting it. It's good they've fixed that.
Speaking of smart cards for visitors, it's a lot easier to cash out unused Myki than Opal, which is a win for Melbourne. Hong Kong Octopus is easy to cash out, too. Sydney makes it unreasonably hard.
Oh, you could use cards at ticket machines in Perth when I was there, as you can in Melbourne. But in Sydney you don't need to do that. In Sydney (like London), you can just tap on/off with a regular credit card and it behaves like a full fare Opal (or Oyster in London). You only need an Opal card if:
Buses in Sydney don't take cash any more, which can be a bit of a pain. You need to top up before catching a bus.
It's been nearly 7 years since I was in Melbourne, so this might no longer work - but an un-advertised hack then was: The ticket is valid for two hours starting from the next hour. So, if you buy a ticket at x:59, your ticket is valid for 2 hours, 1 minute. If you buy it at x:01, you get 2 hours, 59 minutes. That's why I said 2-3 hours. When I was there, they'd priced a 2-zone return journey as being slightly cheaper than a daily fare. The daily cap didn't exist, yet though - these days, it'd likely be $10 for the day either way.
If you touch on/off a tram in the CBD, it didn't cost anything. I often rode my bike to work and took the tram at lunch. The trips would appear on my Myki history, but the fare was $0.
If you buy online, you probably need a Perth address. That may be where you have that impression. So long as you don't need a concession/student card, you've always been able to just walk in and buy one. Also, Perth's SmartRider rolled out in 2002 - it's probably the oldest smart ticketing system in Australia. Not only that, I have been using the same actual card all this time: it's over 20 years old. I was actually a beta tester of the system, and still have the very faded "control group" sticker on my card. I sometimes wonder how many of the control group tickets are still in play.
I've never tried to do this in any city. I just presume I'll be back some day and keep using it.
Oh neat! You can't do this in Perth. Did I mention our system is old?
That was a holdover from the previous paper ticketing system (MetCard) – it would always give you an expiry time on the hour, so a nominal two-hour ticket would last at least two hours. Myki behaved the same way at first, but they changed it a couple of years ago to always give you exactly two hours, so you can’t use that trick any more.
The discounted return trip for a two-zone journey only applied if it was after 9AM. That was another holdover from the paper MetCard system. I believe it was phased out at some point, perhaps when they reduced the price of longer journeys.
The price for a day being the same as two 2-hour trips when you had a multi-trip ticket already existed with the paper MetCard system. There were three multi-trip tickets that were sold for the same price:
The weekly ticket was pretty simple to understand. It was valid for seven logical days, starting on the day that you first validated it (a logical day ended at about 2AM, not midnight – the few services after midnight before transport stopped for the night counted as the previous day). The 5×Daily was pretty simple as well – you could use it all day on five logical days, but they didn’t need to be contiguous. If you travelled most days, including at least one day on the weekend, a weekly would be cheaper. But if you travelled no more than five days per week and sometimes travelled four days or less, the 5×Daily was cheaper, because you could carry over your unused days to the next week.
The 10×2 hour was more complicated. The first time you used it in a logical day, you’d use up one “ride” which would last no less than two hours (i.e. up to 2:59 if you validated right after the hour). The second time you used it in the same logical day, it would use up one more ride which would last until the end of the logical day. So you’d never use more than two of your “rides” in a single logical day, no matter how much you travelled. This meant that there was really no reason to buy a 5×Daily ticket – the 10×2 hour ticket got you the same number of logical days of travel for the same price, with some added flexibility if you occasionally only used a couple of hours worth of public transport.
They never advertised that the 10×2 hour ticket had this feature of upgrading you to daily on your second ride. I think it didn’t have that feature originally, but they rolled it out with no announcement and kept it until the paper ticketing system was retired.
Interesting that it still works after that long. Myki cards expire after a few years (originally three years, but I think they’ve introduced ways to it to at least five years if you continue to use the card). When introduced, Opal cards expired after nine years (I don’t know if they’ve changed this). Hong Kong Octopus cards also expire after a few years. In all three of those systems, you can get the value transferred to another card if your card has expired or will expire soon.