The PTUA has welcomed a new government plan to provide access to public transport by hiring limousines to collect passengers from home to get them to their local station.

With some car parks costing more than $100,000 per space, taking train users to the station by limousine has been found to be cost-competitive with the car park expansion plans of the State and Federal governments, and avoids many of the problems such as the eyesore of multi-storey car park structures in suburban locations.

Catching a limousine to the station will be welcomed by passengers who will no longer need a car just to get to the station. It also avoids many of the problems with the contentious car park expansion plans of the State and Federal governments, such as the mass removal of trees, local traffic congestion at peak times, and impacts on local walkability.

Passengers will book a limo to the station via an app. Just as with station car parks, passengers will pay nothing extra on top of their train fare.

Because each limo can make several trips to the station each peak hour, the service will resolve the issue of car parks filling up by 7am, and will help to bring costs down. It can also be used by people who cannot drive, including children, seniors and those with mobility difficulties.

The PTUA understands that as the program rolls out, further efficiencies are expected to be found, including:

• having multiple passengers travel in each vehicle;
• picking up and dropping people off at a designated location at the end of their street instead of outside their home;
• shifting towards larger, longer vehicles with more seats and wheelchair access;
• running the vehicles on dedicated routes to and from each station, at least every 10 minutes all day, so that people don’t have to book, and they can easily get to the station all day, not just when travelling in peak hour;
• on-road priority, including dedicated lanes and traffic light priority; and
• transitioning to electric vehicles to reduce emissions.

“It’s great to see governments finally thinking about how to get people to public transport without them having to drive a car”, a PTUA spokesperson said.

---

_{Original pic source}

The PTUA has uncovered Department of Transport (DOT) plans to further integrate public transport and road operations, following the integration of Vicroads and Public Transport Victoria into the one broader organisation in 2019 [1].

The next stages of this integration are about to take effect, starting with the merger of the PTV and Vicroads brands into one combined entity, with a shorter simpler name and logo: PTVRds

• 

• 

• 

• 

The new logo is in line with a statutory requirement in Victoria to replace public transport system branding at least every five years.[2]

A DOT source noted that “We don’t plan or operate our road, tram, or rail systems separately – we run a transport network.”

Investment in upgrades will be put on pause for 12 months from 1st April 2021 while priority is given to replacing signage and liveries with the new the logo across the transport network.

Full operational integration for PTVrds is also on the way. Starting in April 2022, the next step in fully integrating public transport and roads will be the synchronisation of road traffic lights with public transport timetables.

This means motorists will have to wait for a green light in a similar way to public transport users waiting for a service.

Different road traffic lights will be matched to comparable public transport modes.

Typical waits for a green at traffic lights will now be as follows:

Road type	Peak-hour	Off-peak and weekend	Evenings	After midnight
Freeway on-ramp	5-10 mins	10-20 mins	30 mins	No green weeknights. 60 mins weekends
Inner-city roads	5-10 mins	10-15 mins	20-30 mins	No green weeknights. A few every 30 mins weekends
Middle and outer suburban roads	20-30 mins	30-60 mins	None. Don’t travel after 9pm.	No green weeknights. A few every 60 mins weekends

A DOT source said that making motorists wait longer for a green would have huge benefits cutting traffic jams as the measure would be very effective at suppressing traffic demand, helping to cut congestion.

“After all, if it’s not convenient to drive where you want, when you want, and to easily connect from one road to another, why would anybody choose that option?”

* * *

[1] https://transport.vic.gov.au/about

[2] On 27/6/2016 the Ministers for Public Transport and for Roads announced Transport For Victoria, which triggered a redesign of signage to exclude the PTV logo, which had been introduced in 2012.

The Public Transport Users Association has welcomed the conversation on public transport fare reform sparked by the release of a new Infrastructure Victoria report “Fair Move: Better Public Transport Fares for Melbourne“.

But PTUA President Dr Tony Morton said many of the proposed measures, like off-peak discounting, would only work properly in the context of improved service frequency and span, particularly in Melbourne’s suburbs. “Off-peak discount fares make a lot of sense,” he said, “particularly in a ‘COVID normal’ world where we need people who can to avoid travelling at peak times to reduce crowding. It’s a fair substitute for ad-hoc measures like the Free Tram Zone that advantage a lucky few without much of a clear policy rationale.”

“The obverse of this is that outside peak times, you often have to wait 20 or 30 minutes for a train, and you can easily be waiting an hour or more for a bus. It’s the poor standard of service, not the lack of a price signal, that’s keeping people away from public transport at these times.”

Multimodal is king

Dr Morton noted Infrastructure Victoria had, in response to feedback from the PTUA and others on its earlier “Good Move” report, moved away from proposals that would have undermined the multimodal nature of the system. “It’s an important principle of our system, as with most of the world’s best, that you don’t charge people extra simply because they need two different modes of public transport to complete their trip rather than just one,” he said. “The Fair Move report accepts this and is improved as a result.”

Despite this, Infrastructure Victoria continues to emphasise the idea of charging different fares for different modes of public transport, a notion that ultimately works against the objectives of the transport system.

“Thanks to decades of hands-off planning, Melbourne has a train system (plus a few express buses that act like trains) heavily oriented toward central-city commuting in peak hour, a well-used but geographically limited tram system, and a residualised bus system that caters to small populations in the suburbs who don’t travel long distances and are prepared to work around infrequent services,” Dr Morton said. “Infrastructure Victoria has looked at this largely-accidental outcome and formed the view that as the train users tend to have higher incomes and bus users lower incomes, charging more for a train and less for a bus is the best way to promote social equity.”

“The problem is that using this kind of statistical profiling as the basis for policy easily leads to unconscious discrimination. Train users have higher incomes on average, but this masks the fact a lot of lower-income people use trains too, including in peak hour. And it’s those lower-income people who are less likely to be able to adjust their work hours and take advantage of discounted off-peak train fares.”

“What the disparity between trains and buses actually reveals is the absence of high-income people from buses, rather than an absence of low-income people from trains. You don’t see this as much in cities like Vienna or Toronto where public transport caters to a higher proportion of the population.”

“Likewise, you can’t expect Infrastructure Victoria’s modelling to have picked this up, because the models are – out of necessity – based on where Melbourne has been, not on where we ultimately want to be as a city.”

Dr Morton pointed out that the mode of transport for a given journey from A to B is determined by long-term network planning and not within the control of individual travellers. “If you’re in Fawkner on the Upfield line and going south to access jobs and services closer to the city, then you’re going to be on a train, even though it only runs every 20 minutes in peak hour and there’s no plan on the horizon to improve that,” he said. “Go further south and there’s a parallel train and tram line for historical reasons, but they’ve evolved complementary roles: the tram is used for local shopping and the train to go to the city. Differential fares might see a lot more people crowd onto that Sydney Road tram, but it’s really hard to see what social purpose that would fulfil.”

“Through all this we also have to remember, the one choice individual travellers can most easily control is whether to use public transport at all or to get in the car. That’s a function of the quality of public transport service available, much more than finer details of fare calculations.”

“Seamless networks with multimodal fares – where what you pay depends on time and place, but not the technicalities of how the system gets you from origin to destination, because that’s the system’s business not yours – have become established as world’s best practice over decades,” Dr Morton said. “By and large, the cities charging different prices for different travel modes are those like Sydney still dealing with the legacy of uncoordinated operators each with their own idiosyncratic fare system. The de facto global standard is the one regional transport authority – ‘Verkehrsverbund’ as the Germans call it – with a single fare scale.”

Myki Pass still valuable

The PTUA agreed with Infrastructure Victoria that replacing the weekly Myki pass with a weekly fare cap, as originally proposed for Myki a decade ago, could make more sense in a post-COVID world where people might only travel any distance from home on 3 or 4 days each week. But monthly and longer Myki passes should stay, as they play a valuable strategic role.

“Abolishing Myki Passes does nothing but alienate public transport’s most loyal customers,” said Dr Morton. “It’s also an important tool to encourage mode shift in a world where the average motorist spends as much on annual registration, insurance and servicing as on petrol or tolls. They’re going to be particularly sensitive to travel options that involve a substantial incremental cost per trip. A Pass is a convenient ‘set and forget’ option that also incentivises the use of public transport for non-work travel – all the more critical in a post-COVID world.”

Independent price setting requires expertise

Ultimately the design of a public transport fare system is a delicate balancing act involving diverse objectives. It needs to be simple for passengers to understand and for authorities to enforce. It must be legible enough that passengers can readily anticipate the cost of their journey. It needs to provide a sustainable revenue source to maintain and expand services, while providing a competitive alternative to private car travel. It should be broadly reflective of the cost of providing the service, but must also be equitable – providing targeted concessions to those of limited means but otherwise charging similar amounts for recognisably similar journeys.

“Designing a fare system and setting fares is a highly complex exercise, with no unique right answer,” Dr Morton said. “It is part of the strategic planning of the entire public transport system and needs to be undertaken by those with appropriate subject-matter expertise.”

The Infrastructure Victoria report includes a recommendation for decisions on fares to be in the hands of an independent authority, modelled on IPART in New South Wales or the Essential Services Commission in Victoria. “The idea may have some merit, but we also need to learn the lessons from NSW,” Dr Morton says. “In that state, the kind of multimodal approach to fares common in other parts of Australia and worldwide has been actively resisted by an ‘independent’ regulator with little relevant expertise in transport planning.”

“The PTUA would be more supportive of these decisions being given to an independent planning agency staffed by experts – such as PTV was intended to be a decade ago.”

A report on transport pricing by Infrastructure Victoria contains some potentially valuable suggestions on pricing of roads and parking, but is breathtakingly naive in its approach to public transport fares.

As part of a comprehensive suite of measures to ‘rationalise’ the pricing of transport in Victoria, the IV report proposes scrapping the Myki zone system in favour of distance-based charging akin to taxi fares. It also proposes different fares depending on the type of vehicle: for example $1.70 plus 8c per kilometre for trains and $0.90 plus 6c per kilometre for buses. All fares would drop by one-third to two-thirds outside peak periods.

While the off-peak discounting proposal has merit, charging differently according to mode and route completely misses the point of having a multimodal network.

The first rule of modern multimodal network planning is that your transport system shouldn’t discriminate according to whether or not one’s local railway station is within walking distance. All well-designed transport systems have feeder bus networks to get people to trains. But as soon as this requires an additional fare for the bus, it just adds to the privilege of those lucky enough to live nearby. It could perversely also incentivise people to drive to the station and add to local congestion and parking pressure.

That’s why almost every city in the world operates a multimodal system where the technical details of the route and vehicle don’t affect what one is charged. This is generally achieved by charging based on zones rather than individual trips, or by providing free transfers. One of the minority that do not is Sydney – yet that’s the city IV singles out for admiration in its report.

Congestion promoter, not congestion buster

The real flaw with IV’s suggestion is that charging different fare rates for trains and buses won’t actually achieve the goal of reducing congestion.

The thinking here is apparently that buses and trains are substitutes for one another – that a bus is just a lower-cost way of making a journey one would otherwise make by train. So the story goes, you can reduce crowding on trains by getting people to ride buses instead.

But in real public transport systems, the different travel modes play distinct roles and are not direct substitutes. We operate different modes of transport for a reason, not just because it looks good. We don’t waste valuable bus resources on duplicating rail services. Rail is the heavy-lifting, high-capacity mode: a train line moves tens of thousands of people per hour per track, compared with 1500 per hour for a motorway lane or 6000 per hour for a busway.

By and large public transport has just one big congestion problem: into the city in the morning peak and out in the evening peak. At virtually all other times and places, public transport is well placed to absorb mode-shift from car travel. The real deterrent here at present is not the price of buses relative to trains: it’s the fact the frequency and reliability of buses (and sometimes trains) is so poor. It’s a common official mistake to assume a failure to use infrequent, unreliable services indicates a general disdain for public transport or a preference for car travel, rather than just a rational response to poor service.

Melbourne public transport reserves its better standard of service for city-focussed travel in the peaks, and this is where its genuine congestion problem lies. Planners can mitigate this by encouraging more travel to shift to peak-shoulder periods. Price incentives are one way to do this, alongside improvements in all-day service frequency. But if these options are exhausted and peak crowding remains a problem, the only way this will be solved is by sweating the rail assets – not pushing people onto lower-capacity modes, which will only exacerbate crowding and congestion.

The concern is that IV is being led into an outdated “trains for the rich, buses for the poor” narrative – one that’s reflective of underperforming transport systems in many British or US cities, and in a self-reinforcing cycle, has been the main political barrier to any substantial improvement in bus services wherever this attitude prevails. But it’s also completely at odds with the way well-planned systems work in Europe, Asia or Canada. In those places, people use their local bus to go to the shops or railway station, then catch a train to go further afield – and pay one fare to cover the trip.

Micro-charging by distance, alongside its other flaws, is also unlikely to have any marked effect on peak congestion. Peak-hour commuting trips are probably the least price sensitive of all: a couple of extra dollars a day is no incentive to anyone to move closer to their city workplace.

It probably doesn’t help that IV have relied on a simulation model for Melbourne transport in 2031 that includes a number of road projects (such as the Outer Metropolitan Ring eastern section) that government has not committed to, yet leaves out rail projects that are current government commitments such as the Airport link and Suburban Rail Loop, as well as potential future rail initiatives such as Melbourne Metro 2. This is symptomatic of a long-standing and disturbing pro-road bias in official evaluations of infrastructure initiatives.

Good in parts

There is certainly merit to introducing some form of off-peak discount on Myki fares, similar to the 30% discount that applies on V/Line.

The IV report correctly notes Melbourne had off-peak discounts in the 1970s, but it’s less well known that off-peak discount fares continued to exist right up until 2012. The real problem is they were undermined by successive, uncoordinated tweaks to the fare system over three decades. It’s quite appropriate that they be re-evaluated, in a way that also addresses the remaining anomalies in the Myki fare system.

We also agree with the need to reform user charging for roads and car parking, as fuel excise revenue is undermined by a future transition to electric vehicles. This provides, as IV argues, an opportunity to replace high fixed charges for registration and third-party insurance, which currently act as a disincentive for car owners to leave the car at home more often.

However, such pricing reform needs to be done equitably and transparently, and without introducing further perverse incentives. Where is the sense, for example, in building a motorway to ‘relieve’ arterial road congestion and then, via tolling, giving motorists an incentive to go on using those same arterial roads in preference to the new route?

But in its approach to public transport, IV needs to go back to the drawing board. The PTUA has pointed out for decades that the cost of running public transport is best recovered with a modest, fixed charge that varies ‘coarsely’ by distance – like Melbourne’s zone system used to do but without such a massive penalty for crossing a zone boundary. This also has the greatest promise of reducing congestion by shifting car trips to public transport.

The bottom line is the way to really bust congestion is always to encourage more public and active transport, and especially more rail travel. Because if we plan properly, rail is the mode best placed to absorb additional patronage.

Following our approach to the State Government, PTV have advised us today that they can now pause your Myki Pass.

By pausing a Myki Pass, any remaining travel days will be ready for use when you are ready to get back onto public transport.

This applies to both Commuter Club (through PTUA or other organisations) and to regular Myki Passes.

In order to pause a Myki Pass, PTV will need to block your existing card and send you a new one, which will be activated the next time it is touched on.

You will need to call PTV on 1800 800 007 so this pause can be arranged.

Please note that any replacement card will be sent to the address on your account – in some cases, this may be a business address.

The PTV call centre team can assist with updating these address details if required.

Whilst PTV can arrange to have the Myki Pass paused, if your Commuter Club card was arranged via your employer, you may need to talk them regarding any payroll deductions that you have.

If you would prefer a refund on your Myki Pass instead of a pause, PTV can also help with that. Call 1800 800 007 and the PTV call centre team can assist with providing a refund quote or advise on the best option for you.

• More details from PTV are here

Also note:

• Myki Money is not affected if you do not use public transport for a period. The balance will remain in place for when you resume travel.
• Be aware that Online topups and new Auto topups may become “dormant” if they are initiated on the Myki web site but you don’t use the Myki card for more than 90 days afterwards. This means they may not be immediately available the next time you travel.