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

On 6th November 2008, the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) held a Public Hearing as part of the Review of Metropolitan and Outer Metropolitan bus fares. Action for Public Transport made a presentation on the day, and the following is an edited version of the text.

The Executive Summary of APTNSW's formal submission to this review contains fourteen one-line points.

We commend certain changes, such as the new private bus weekly ticket and the establishment of a fixed city-wide discount of 20% on all ten-trip tickets. We tolerate, without actually endorsing, the small price rises in most tickets. We accept with patience the government's adherence to the current fares and ticketing system with all its limitations, always looking hopefully to the new dawn tomorrow.

But some proposals we absolutely reject. Our strongest opposition is to the rape of the popular TravelPass ticket, an unjustified and completely unjustifiable assault. The Ministry has sought increases in single fares of 5.45%, but the increases sought for TravelPasses range from 6.3% to 18.1%.

The TravelPass has been stalked by the government for over ten years now, at one stage even trying to exterminate it by separating the bus and rail components into two different tickets.

The root of this loathing is the addiction of the Ministry, abetted by IPART, to the mantras of cost recovery and pay-for-distance fares.

This is the accountant's approach, charging for journeys as if they are some desirable commodity. The Ministry, and IPART, should start from the base: "what fares should we charge to ensure that Sydney's transport network, both roads and public transport, functions at an optimum level?"

The standard discount for other pre-paid multi-ride tickets is 20%, and APTNSW has no problem with that. The attempt to apply this discount to TravelPasses evokes a range of adjectives, including illogical, inaccurate, ingenuous, impossible, and many others which politeness forbids.

Sydney commuters can choose from a range of nine TravelPasses covering various zones. Quite correctly, the price of each should be compared with the price of alternative tickets and also bear some relationship to other prices in the family of TravelPass tickets.

But additional considerations intrude. The convenience and the capped expenditure of the TravelPass appeal to the user, and the provider has a customer who is committed to using the service - just like a phone plan.

The Ministry, in its attempts to calculate the so-called discount offered by the current TravelPass prices, has in most cases embellished the likely usage pattern of the ticket by a commuter, and in a few cases has blatantly overstated it.

By our calculations, the Ministry's figures for the so-called discounts on Red, Green, and 2Zone TravelPasses are reasonable, those for Yellow, Pink and Purple TravelPasses are a little too high, and for the Orange TravelPass are inflated. For the Blue and Pittwater TravelPasses they are grossly exaggerated.

This is not the place to quote detailed figures, but the errors, or might we say imaginings of the Ministry fall into four categories:

1. using fares from railway stations at the outer edge of each zone to calculate the rail content;
2. assuming that all users in a particular zone would use a ferry, when most would not;
3. assessing the likely travel pattern of only one person in their back-of-the-envelope modelling, instead of a range of users, and finding an average;
4. failing to include the penalty cost of the second flagfall when changing modes.