Is collecting fares worth the money?

[Aidan]

BTW, monthly/yearly tickets suffer some of the problems that have been raised for free-transit: having bought a year ticket, my travel for that year is now free and it's in my interests to take as many trips as possible using it.

That's not a problem, it's an advantage.

Aidan, the problems that I was referring to were the "unlimited spurious trips" problems mentioned by Norman ("it would increase pointless trips for 1 or 2 stops"), AtD (as "the tragedy of the commons"), and most recently by yourself ("The policy was ended as schoolkids were piling onto buses to travel only a stop or two, filling them up and slowing them down.").

The difference is that Adults are unlikely to catch the bus for a single stop journey.

It's the same situation as with cars and roads: having bought a comparatively expensive car, all my trips are cheap, so it's in my interest to extract as much value as I can by driving as much as possible; likewise an expensive bus ticket that makes all my trips free.

That's why having those tickets is such an advantage.

BTW, I was at uni in '90-91 - part of the first generation to pay HECS (we were a bitter, bitter generation) - and got to see the next crop of school kids get free tickets while I was still catching public transport daily, as I had done for years. I can tell you that there were hordes of school kids catching buses both before and after those free public transport halcyon days, as indeed there still are.

Indeed there are, but there were more of them when it was free (indeed I was one of those who continued to use it after it stopped being free). The case for it was never particularly strong, so it didn't take much to provoke the government to reverse the decision.

I would be interested to see any hard figures that support the claim that giving free trips to schoolkids was slowing the buses enough to warrant removing that benefit. And I can assure you that the airwaves and papers were thick with complaints about truancy (stories of errant children being almost as popular as dole-bludgers, dodgy-builders, tenants-from-hell, and slum-landlords with our beloved media outlets).

Maybe they were, but that wasn't the reason they stopped free travel. And the school leaving age at that time was definitely still 15.

[AtD]

Our current ticketing system only shows where people get on, not where they get off. If you want detailed information about the origin and destination, you're better off using passenger surveys.

The ABS Census collects some limited data too. IIRC it collects where everyone works and what method of transportation they used. If you have more patience than I do, you might even be able to get it off their website.

[Aidan]

Our current ticketing system only shows where people get on, not where they get off. If you want detailed information about the origin and destination, you're better off using passenger surveys.

The ABS Census collects some limited data too. IIRC it collects where everyone works and what method of transportation they used. If you have more patience than I do, you might even be able to get it off their website.

They certainly do collect that data, but getting it in a useful enough form might be a problem, and you certainly wouldn't be able to get it off their website. I had originally intended to use census data for my Investigation Project last year, but I was unable to get origin-destination matrices from the census data. I had to use MASTEM simulation output data instead - although MASTEM itself is calibrated from census data, so it must be possible to get detailed information from the ABS.

[Prince George]

Let me try to be more concrete about my qualms over year/month passes. Suppose that there was a town where single bus tickets cost $2. A daily public transport user takes 2 trips per day, 5 days a week, plus some trips on weekends - so how much would they charge for the passes? In a month, the daily rider spends about $80-90, so they charge $50-60 for the monthly pass; 12 monthly passes would then be $600-700, so they charge $500 for the year's pass. Daily use 48 weeks of the year (plus some extras on weekends etc) would work out as about 500 trips per year, or about 42 trips per month, and so in our hypothetical town the cost of riding the bus averages out to $2 if you buy single tickets, $1.42 if you buy a monthly pass, or $1 if you buy a year's pass.

Which is all well and good, except that not everyone can afford to shell out $500 all at once. For the wealthier parts of town, that's an affordable amount that offers significant savings to them. The less wealthy might be able to buy it using credit (when the cost is no longer $500 to them, after interest), otherwise they might buy a monthly pass and effectively pay 40% more than the people in the higher income bracket. Then at the bottom of the barrel are those who can't even afford the monthly pass, and who have to buy each ticket singly.

The upshot? The wealthier you are, the more likely you can afford the expensive passes, and then the cheaper it is for you ride the bus; and the people at the bottom of the scale might well end up spending as much in a year, but would only be able to take half as many trips.

Second, having bought a month or year pass, it's clearly in my economic self-interest to use it as much as possible and extract as much value from it as I can. And so if the price of the passes is sufficiently low that the vast majority of people can afford them, then we're back to the situation where people have a clear motivation to use public transport for any and all purposes, which you were arguing was a bad thing. Alternatively, if the price of passes is kept sufficiently high for a significant proportion of the population to not be able to afford them, then we've made a classist system, where the wealthiest get the opportunity for cheaper fares than the poorest.

BTW, Aidan, if you actually have a reference somewhere for how great the impact of free travel for schoolkids was on the buses, and for that being the reason to drop it, I'm still interested to see it.

[Aidan]

Let me try to be more concrete about my qualms over year/month passes. Suppose that there was a town where single bus tickets cost $2. A daily public transport user takes 2 trips per day, 5 days a week, plus some trips on weekends - so how much would they charge for the passes? In a month, the daily rider spends about $80-90, so they charge $50-60 for the monthly pass; 12 monthly passes would then be $600-700, so they charge $500 for the year's pass. Daily use 48 weeks of the year (plus some extras on weekends etc) would work out as about 500 trips per year, or about 42 trips per month, and so in our hypothetical town the cost of riding the bus averages out to $2 if you buy single tickets, $1.42 if you buy a monthly pass, or $1 if you buy a year's pass.

I can understand why monthly passes would be priced so much cheaper than single tickets - it saves lots of time. But I don't understand why yearly passes would be priced so much lower than the monthly passes - it would save hardly any time, so what advantage would it give the seller?

Second, having bought a month or year pass, it's clearly in my economic self-interest to use it as much as possible and extract as much value from it as I can. And so if the price of the passes is sufficiently low that the vast majority of people can afford them, then we're back to the situation where people have a clear motivation to use public transport for any and all purposes, which you were arguing was a bad thing. Alternatively, if the price of passes is kept sufficiently high for a significant proportion of the population to not be able to afford them, then we've made a classist system, where the wealthiest get the opportunity for cheaper fares than the poorest.

You're forgetting that not everyone who can afford them will buy them. It would always make sense for commuters to buy season tickets, but many people don't travel that often.

BTW, Aidan, if you actually have a reference somewhere for how great the impact of free travel for schoolkids was on the buses, and for that being the reason to drop it, I'm still interested to see it.

I don't think I've got a reference, but I'll have a look.

[monotonehell]

I can understand why monthly passes would be priced so much cheaper than single tickets - it saves lots of time. But I don't understand why yearly passes would be priced so much lower than the monthly passes - it would save hardly any time, so what advantage would it give the seller?

If such a thing was offered the reason a bigger pass might be cheaper than a smaller pass is due to the time value of money -- that is a dollar now is "worth more" than a dollar in 12 months time. The discount involved wouldn't be huge however.

BTW back when monthly passes were an option here, I seem to remember that mostly they were sold to unemployed people. If you didn't have a car and you were looking for work back then (no Internet!) you sometimes had to catch several buses in a day. Off to the CES, get a ticket for a job, then off to see the employer or two. That's when they started to be worth it.

[AtD]

Sydney has Weekly, Fortnightly, Monthly and Annual tickets. Then again, Sydney has a few hundred ticketing rules. There are still buses that accept cash only.

[Prince George]

I can understand why monthly passes would be priced so much cheaper than single tickets - it saves lots of time. But I don't understand why yearly passes would be priced so much lower than the monthly passes - it would save hardly any time, so what advantage would it give the seller?

If such a thing was offered the reason a bigger pass might be cheaper than a smaller pass is due to the time value of money -- that is a dollar now is "worth more" than a dollar in 12 months time. The discount involved wouldn't be huge however.

I was thinking more of the risk of losing it and the replacement cost. Suppose that you bought a year ticket for (12x month ticket) in January, and then in June you misplace it - you now have to pay for 6 months of tickets, and you've paid 18-months worth all up. With a monthly pass, you would buy a daily ticket until the end of the month and then you're back on track - still annoying, but much less bad than the first case. That risk drives down the price that someone would pay for it.

Following AtD's mention of Sydney's ticketing, if you look at the metro ticket prices, the annual pass is $924, which is 42x the weekly pass of $22.

[AtD]

I'd be very surprised if more than a handful of people have bought those annual passes, since they're only valid on the one tram line, and that doesn't go very far.
http://www.metrotransport.com.au/NetworkMap.pdf

I think you were after this:
http://www.cityrail.info/fares/travelpass.jsp

Sydney's PT is run by a huge number of companies, each with a different ticketing system.

[Prince George]

I'd be very surprised if more than a handful of people have bought those annual passes, since they're only valid on the one tram line, and that doesn't go very far.
http://www.metrotransport.com.au/NetworkMap.pdf

I think you were after this:
http://www.cityrail.info/fares/travelpass.jsp

Sydney's PT is run by a huge number of companies, each with a different ticketing system.

Ah, thanks for that. Still, yearly = 40x weekly, and is about 10% less than 4 quarterlies. So if you've got $1500-2400 in the piggy bank, you can save almost 25% compared to weekly tickets. The pricing *is* complicated, but running some examples through their fare calculator puts the yearly pass as about the price of 165 return trips, better than half price.