Anyway back to the issue, the discount is certainly an incentive to use public transport, I eagerly await the 17th trip and watch the cost of transport my plummet. My monthly spend is less NZD$40 and I use the system almost every day including weekends. Having a population of over 12 million certainly helps.

You can really only price to reflect market demand if people are paying electronically.

You can set a “peak” and “off-peak” price and and have different coloured tickets, just like you can have paper concessional fares. It has probably been done for over a hundred years in over a hundred cities.
The system you are talking about sounds like it would be priced according to how many people are on the bus or in the system at a particular time, and will only serve to make it complicated.

If that makes sense to anyone then you have a future in the public service. To my mind it appears even more convoluted than a permanent change to the smart card fare differential for a single zone from 20% to 17%.

It makes double less sense given that 2-3 year fare projections are part of the thought process.

The discount is there as an incentive for people to use the card – so that you don’t have people searching pockets for loose change while holding up the bus queue. It should be priced in to the overall fare structure. It’s not a tool to be perturbed to compensate for temporary budget blips.

If the discounts need a permanent change then make it so. Ditto for the headline fares.

I guess this is a taste of what to expect with GST if the Greens ever get to influence treasury/revenue.

I like the idea of cheaper fares at off peak times also. You can really only price to reflect market demand if people are paying electronically.

[DPF: Thanks for the clarification]

In Beijing a few years ago they dropped the price of a bus trip from 2.00 RMB down to 0.40 RMB for those with cards, but didn’t reduce the cash fare at all. The result was that there were massive queues for people wanting to use buses.

In Queensland in the last few years since the introduction of the GO card, the price of a fare to Brisbane from my local railway station on the Gold Coast has kept pace with in inflation, and is about $8 one way. The price for my friend who was visiting for Soundwave last weekend and had to buy a paper ticket was over $15, and you can’t buy a return fare any more.
It’s a good idea in theory, but in this part of the world I believe it will be used as an excuse to raise the cost of paper fares rather than a discount for using a prepaid card.

Campit said

Yep agree. And if there is excess capacity at off peak times then price tickets cheaper for off-peak travel as well.

They always used to do that on the trains in Wellington (I can’t say whether they still do since I don’t ride the train in Wellington any more). They also give away freebies to old people which I disagree with – it should be $3 for a pensioner to go wherever they want like in Sydney. Still a discount but not free.

People hold up Sydney as a good example of how public transport should be run, and it is. The trains usually run on time and are pretty efficient especially compared to driving, it’s reasonably cheap, and the buses are tolerable and have pretty good timetables even on Sundays. But it’s still complained about in Sydney. It is never good enough for some people and the media are always going on about how bad it is. No matter how good a system you have, there will still be complaints.

Of course if it reduces demand (which is a generally accepted implication of the principle of supply & demand – PT demand is not generally, let alone universally, inelastic) then we can anticipate a further increase in the ratepayer subsidisation.

Has Jim Henson’s production company taken over the WRC?

Presumably this was set at a 20% to keep it simple and easy to understand.

Now some twit wants to make it 17% in one zone (and keep 20% in others – although that’s not explicitly mentioned). The likely reason being that the council can claim it did not increase the published fare by as much as they need to.

It takes a special kind of person to think that way.

I don’t really want to organise cards and payments. I’d prefer to just pay for what I need, when I need at a good price.

At the moment as a car commuter I subsidise the public transport system through my rates and then on the occasions that I do take a bus I get stung for not taking it 10 times.

Is it justified to give some ratepayers a preferential price over others?

Compare that with Sydney’s Family Funday Sunday where for $2.50 per person, your family can enjoy a great value day out anywhere in Greater Sydney with unlimited travel on all trains, buses, ferries and light rail.