ticketing

This article was in the Sunday Age.

Are Melbourne's trains on the wrong track?

Sunday 16 December 2001

LONDON/Stephanie Bunbury

My journey takes me to Bures, a small town in Essex within the London
commuter belt. To get to Liverpool Street station, I take the London
Underground, buying a one-way ticket from Kennington, an inner-London stop,
for just under 2.

Tickets can be bought from a vending machine or a ticket office and must be
clicked through a turnstile to get to the platform. In 15 years of London
Tube travel I have never seen a vandalised machine.

I could buy a 4 travel card, which would allow travel on all trains or buses
within the urban area for a day. Tubes are shabby, but run every few
minutes. The journey, including one change, takes about 15 minutes
mid-morning.

The train from Liverpool Street to Norwich, however, leaves late. (Four out
of 10 British trains run late, according to figures released by the
Department of Transport last week.) It then continues to run slowly. It
arrives at Marks Tey, where you are supposed to change trains for the
shuttle train to Sudbury via Bures, half an hour late. In the absence of an
integrated transport system, the Sudbury train has not waited. There is a
wait of almost half an hour. I arrive at Bures an hour late.

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In the six years since privatisation of British Rail, there has been no
evidence of improved services, says the passenger watchdog body.

Trains are frequently dirty and so overcrowded that companies have been
known to take out seats on peak trains.

Railtrack, the company that runs the tracks, is in administration and
looking for a buyer, with a major government bail-out also on the cards.


Despite its problems and its worrying safety record, the rail system is
increasing in popularity. Britons took more than a billion journeys by rail
last year.

WASHINGTON/Angela Mrema

The American Public Transport Association says Washington's Metro is the
best in the United States. Together, Metrorail and Metrobus carry 625,000
people each week, second only to New York city.

Tickets are bought from a vending machine at any metro station. A passenger
cannot get through a turnstile without inserting the ticket, which is
automatically checked again on departure.

It is virtually impossible to evade a fare. "Station managers," who also
help customers with their general questions, man all turnstiles in each
Metrorail station.

On a bus, the passenger inserts a ticket or money into a machine next to the
driver, so fare evasion is extremely rare. Customers moving from Metrorail
to Metrobus pick up a free transfer ticket from the station. Changing from a
bus to a train requires a new ticket.

Metro makes just enough money to break even. Fifty-five per cent of Metro's
revenues are generated from customer use. The federal government and the
municipalities of Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia pay the
rest.

The 35-year-old Metrorail system is one of the best kept and aesthetically
pleasing systems in the country. The subway cars are clean and comfortable,
vandalism is rare.

There are some complaints. Station escalators and elevators are often out of
order and repairing them takes longer than it should. Urban sprawl has meant
that Metro is straining to keep up with population growth.

Despite these shortcomings, riding Washington DC's public transport system
is an efficient, safe and pleasant experience.

BEIJING/John Schauble

For most Beijing residents, barring the ubiquitous bicycle, public transport
is the only way to get around the city. While China is gripped by car fever,
few can afford a private vehicle. Taxi fares are also prohibitively
expensive for the average worker.

In a city of more than 12 million people, the options are pretty much
limited to buses or the two-line subway. A single ride on the subway costs
three yuan (about 75 cents).

With average weekly earnings around 1000 yuan, riding the underground is not
an option for many. Buses are one yuan per trip. It is possible to purchase
monthly tickets for both.

Unlike Hong Kong and lately Shanghai, nothing is automated on the Beijing
system. Tickets for the subway are bought at a booth at ground level (the
sellers are almost invariably women), then checked by another attendant
before you descend the escalator.

With only two lines, there can be little confusion.

The Beijing underground is clean and vandalism is rare. Some of the rolling
stock is a little antiquated but the system runs smoothly and is generally
not too crowded.

Back on ground level, finding a bus that is not jam-packed at any hour can
be a challenge. Tickets are sold by on-board conductors.

The city has been progressively upgrading its buses over the past two years.

Mini and micro buses, with ticket touts hanging from the windows, are now
barred from the inner city. Lumbering old vehicles have largely been
replaced by newer models powered with LPG.

The city's famous trolley buses are also in the process of being upgraded.

HONG KONG/Alan Morison

There is one annoying aspect to commuting via Hong Kong's mass transit rail
system: almost as soon as you start reading your newspaper, the train is at
the station.

A sparkling clean silver cylinder glides along every two minutes or so at
peak times. And even though eating and smoking are banned, and there are no
toilets on the stations, commuting on the system is extremely convenient.

What makes it work well, even with the crowds, is the Hong Kong wave. That's
what people do as they pass through the turnstiles.

In their hand, and often working from deep inside a purse or wallet, is a
futuristic device called an Octopus card. These days, schoolchildren even
wear watches with the Octopus chip embedded, so it can't be lost or
forgotten.

The Octopus can now also be used to make purchases in 7-Eleven stores or at
vending machines. Need to catch a train, then a bus, then a ferry to visit a
friend on another island? Just wave, wave and wave again.

Turnstiles click for the MTR and the ferry, and the bus driver checks that
you have used your card properly as you board.

The remarkable card does the rest, totting up each transaction and
delivering the appropriate sum to each of about 40 transport companies.

Fare evasion is a thing of the past. And so are holes in your pockets caused
by small change.

Beginners buy an Octopus for $150 (about $A35) which includes a $50 deposit.

Then just top it up at conveniently placed station kiosks: the turnstiles
frequently provide your latest balance.

The card allows you to run up a small debt and a personalised Octopus will
even take the money straight from your bank account.

About five million Octopus transactions take place on a typical day and
seven million cards have been issued, many of them to tourists delighted at
the way it works.

While the cost of introduction and expansion must be sizeable, efficiency
and lack of evasion help keep fares down.

But nothing is perfect. On Hong Kong's antiquated trams, slowness and small
coins still rule.


SYDNEY/Caroline Overington

Visitors often find this strange, but you can't catch a ferry from Bondi to
the city. Still, it is a relatively simple affair: a bus then a train. Bus
tickets are available from the driver: it costs $1.50 to get to the nearest
railway station, Bondi Junction, which is about two kilometres away.

You cannot, however, buy a train ticket on the bus. You have to do that at
the railway station, from a person in a booth, or a ticket machine.

Alternately, you can buy a "Travelpass" from any railway or ferry station,
and most newsagents, and use that on any bus, train or ferry you like, for a
week, month or year.

Ticket in hand, you proceed through the station barrier. It opens only when
you put the ticket in, and you can't get out of the station, without doing
the same. Not all stations have these barriers.

The barriers easily handle the swarms of people. More than half a million
people in Sydney catch public transport to work.

Inspectors are everywhere. Despite the apparent efficiency of the system,
fare evasion is believed to cost about $30 million a year.

At the railway stations, uniformed guards watch to make sure people don't
try to slip through the barriers with concession tickets.

I get off the train at busy Town Hall, in the centre of Sydney. I take the
privately owned Monorail to work. It has immaculate stations. One trip costs
$3, which you use to buy a token.. The journey is quick and smooth.

So, three modes of transport, three different tickets. Had a ferry been
involved, that would have been another ticket, unless you buy a weekly pass.
Total cost $7.10. Time of journey: 45 minutes. Distance travelled: 12
kilometres.

ATHENS/Victoria Kyriakopoulos

Commuting in Athens used to be a bit of a nightmare until the new
underground metro opened early last year.

While the rail network is far from complete, the metro has hundreds of
thousands of passengers using state-run public transport for the first time.
Tickets are available at ticket machines or in manned booths at stations.
You have to validate as you walk through to the platform areas but there are
no turnstiles.

Compliance is randomly checked by roving inspectors. The new stations are
virtual museums and galleries, with public art and antiquities found during
excavation works.

High security, including armed guards, and general pride in the metro appear
to have eliminated vandalism and graffiti on the trains and the stations.
The same can't be said about the old trains and stations, which are
regularly vandalised.

The metro is separate from the bus and cable bus systems, although the
24-hour daily travel ticket allows you to travel on all three (including the
airport express buses).

Tickets only need to be validated on the first leg of the journey and are
widely available at kiosks around Athens or from railway stations or public
transport booths.

Without a daily card, you need a ticket for each leg of the journey. As a
Melburnian, I was a little taken aback when I first saw people automatically
validating tickets without a conductor on board.

While Athens inspectors do random checks and fine on the spot, they are not
so common as to be such a deterrent - it seems to be part of the culture.

PARIS/Tamara Thiessen

My monthly Carte Orange - a standard Metro ticket accompanied by my
photograph - is a combined train, bus and tram ticket offered by the RATP
(Regie Autonome des Transports Parisiens), the public transport authority in
Paris.

The Carte Orange allows me to change from the Metro with its 14 lines and
297 stations of central Paris to the five suburban lines of the Reseau
Express Regional, where I also have bus and tram options.

Metro tickets can be bought from either a ticket office at the railway
station or a ticket machine.

The iconic green Metro ticket with its magnetic strip lets me through the
turnstile, and, as is often the case in smaller or unsurveyed stations, I am
quickly followed through in tandem by a traveller seeking a free ride.

The cost of fraud to the RATP is 350 million francs a year ($A92 million),
or 10 per cent of its direct takings. But fraud is a much greater problem on
the buses and trams where the only check on tickets is the threat of one of
the 600 inspectors coming along. In five years on the Metro I have never
encountered a ticket inspector whereas the RATP "sharks" descend quickly and
frequently on other transport.

In an attempt to cut fraud, the Metro and Carte Orange tickets are to be
phased out by 2003 to be replaced by the NAVIGO - an electronic credit
card-sized ticket individualised with photo ID and rechargeable on the
Internet.

According to Le Monde newspaper it's the latest lift for the "objet fetiche"
of public transport in Paris. A fetish fuelled by the fact that the Metro
alone carries more than four million travellers a day who pass an average 90
minutes on public transport. The daily grind in Paris is thus captured by
the three words "metro, bulot, dodo": getting to work, working and sleeping.

TOKYO/Mick Millett

The bus driver - in peaked cap, company uniform and white gloves - opens the
automated door to let in the first passengers. Some schoolgirls flash their
monthly bus passes. An old woman tumbles some coins into the automatic
vending slot. Other commuters slide electronic cards into a machine next to
the driver.

Fee-paying is a slick operation for this private bus line - just as it is
for other parts of Japan's public transport system.

So massive are the people transfers (the population of Melbourne could pass
through busy Shinjuku station in one day), that the system could not work
without such a process. A major malfunction at one of the main access points
at Shinjuku can cause a crowd logjam, actually endangering lives. To avoid
these kinds of problems, Japan's public and private transport companies have
invested huge sums of money in state-of-the-art fare-processing technology.

On the elaborate subway system that runs underneath Tokyo, train users can
buy metro cards that allow them to bulk-buy usage across the entire network.
Fares are automatically calculated as passengers enter and leave station
gates, progressively running down the original card value. There is a
mind-numbing array of fare plans and cross-system options.

The two biggest problems faced by Melbourne's suburban rail network - fare
evasion and vandalism - are almost unknown here.

The electronic gates and round-the-clock manning of stations act as major
inhibitors. But culture is probably the biggest factor.

Public transport is so essential to the lives of most Japanese that damaging
the system is simply not contemplated.

NEW YORK/Phillip McCarthy

New York's public trains, the subway, and its buses are run by a state
government agency, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which also
operates commuter railways to Long Island and Westchester county. Another
authority operates commuter trains from New Jersey.

The subway and city buses have become inter-connected in recent years but
there is still little integration with the commuter railways.

The best news has been the introduction of a fare card system, Metro Card,
that operates on the subways and city buses (but not trains).

Essentially, for a flat $US1.50 ($A3) a ride, passengers can travel anywhere
through the five boroughs of the city, changing from subway trains to buses
and back on free transfers (as long as the card "reads" the transfers as a
continuous journey).

E-transfers have largely replaced paper transfers which enabled passengers
to change between buses but not from buses to trains and back.

Metro Cards are sold at vending machines, news stands and booths at stations
that sell the travel currency that the authority hopes the cards will
eventually supercede: the easily counterfeited metal tokens that were the
only way to ride the system before the cards.

New York's subway has a huge network, operates 24 hours day but is
notoriously user-unfriendly.

Lines carry number or letter names that give no hint of destination, it has
express and local trains that seem to change status at will, its stations
are often decrepit and announcements are often incomprehensible. The fallout
from September 11, with the loss of several city stations, and the rerouting
of some lines, hasn't helped.



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