Action for Public Transport (N.S.W.) Inc.

The New Tcard - What They Haven't Told You About It

posted Sunday 1 August 2004

After years of developing underground, the smart card for Sydney’s public transport poked its nose into the sunlight for the first time last week. However, the precise nature of the new creature is still very much a mystery.

Students at seven primary and high schools on Sydney’s north shore began a trial of the Tcard on their school buses from 27th July 2004.

At this stage, the Tcard is not a fare paying or collecting system because no fare is involved. The card is merely recording actual numbers of school passholders using each bus. This is a commendable objective, and an improvement on the current unreliable method of reimbursing bus companies for the number of students supposedly carried. Similar trials will be extended to other private bus companies later in the year.

When its wings are dry, the Tcard will fly to the Inner-West in March 2005 for trials on paying passengers using selected stations and routes operated by CityRail, State Transit, a private bus company and Sydney Ferries.

The Minister has ever been willing to tell the public about the physical operation of Tcard, how you will pass it near a reader, and it will deduct the fare from your pre-paid card, and how you won’t need to fumble for cash, etc. However, the Minister has been less than willing to tell us how much money will be deducted from your card each time. It is also expected that every card user will have to pay a deposit on the card.

For casual public transport users who will pay cash to the driver or at the ticket box, it probably won’t make much difference, and anyway, it's likely they won’t outlay the deposit and the cost of charging up a card in the first place.

The commuters who should worry are those who use discounted tickets such as TravelTens, FerryTens, TravelPasses and rail weeklies. There has been no promise of what discounts, if any, will be continued, or how they will be calculated and given.

The Tcard web site, http://www.tcard.com.au/ is similarly short on such detail.

Until the precise methods of fare calculation and deduction are revealed, the public is entitled to regard the Minister’s new creature as a nasty stinger to be avoided rather than the beautiful butterfly that the Minister paints it to be.

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