Say farewell to the free weekend travel in NSW

IT IS being promoted as a fairer system for all commuters. But it’s really just a sneaky way to make you pay hundreds more a year on your commute.

OPINION

THE NSW Government has dressed up changes to Opal cards with a cheery rainbow ribbon and smiley face sticker, but it’s just a sneaky way to rip you off.

From today, a government sleight of hand is going to make our lives a whole lot more expensive — by hundreds of dollars.

It’s a sneaky dip into our wallet to crowbar out some more cash and yet the government has the cheek to tell us travel is going to be fairer.

It concerns the little black Opal smartcards that millions use to travel around Sydney, Central Coast, Wollongong and Newcastle.

This morning a series of changes were made to Opal.

They tell us the system is “fairer” and, hand on heart, it costs no more for a journey today than it did yesterday.

In fact, if your journey to work involves changing from, say, a bus to a train, then your fare could actually have gone down.

Sounds fair and it was something loads of commuters have been calling for.

But what the government giveth with the one hand, it taketh away. They have ripped something away regular commuters have come to treasure.

Say farewell to this sweet sight.

THE END OF FREE WEEKEND TRIPS

From this morning your journeys will no longer tick down, one-by-one, until you get free trips.

Commuters using Brisbane’s Go Card will be familiar with free trips as they get them too but for confused Myki users, let me explain.

Called the Weekly Travel Reward, it meant usually around Thursday evening, even earlier if you’d had a sneaky trip out after work one weeknight, you would complete eight journeys and from then on NSW was your free travel oyster.

There was nothing to beat that little leap of joy as you tapped off on the way back home and, for the first time that week, the reader said $0.00. My friends would call it “being on zeros”. From then on, every trip, be it the three minutes from Central to Redfern, or the three hours from Central to Nowra would cost nix, nought, nada, nothing.

Happy weekends of carefree, cost-free blissful travel awaited. Break to the Blue Mountains? Sure. Mosey on down to Mittagong? Marvellous. Take the winding railway down to Wollongong? Why not.

But not anymore.

The government says it can’t afford to lose the $300 million in lost revenue from those trips; that fares make up only less than 20 per cent of the cost of public transport and only about 30 per cent of people ever get to eight trips anyway.

Why should other passengers — those that don’t get to zeros — subsidise your Sunday sojourns?

Yet they knew all this when they introduced Opal. And they won’t make up that $300 million as people will simply choose not to make as many trips.

In fact, for a number of Opal users the loss of the price hike has been enough for them to ditch the card altogether and jump back in the car.

Fancy a weekend getaway to the Three Sisters? Well, it’ll cost you more from now on.

‘I’M SCREWED OVER WITH A FARE RISE’

For my crime of not having a car, of not clogging up the roads, of being active and contributing to the economy of country towns on a Saturday, I’m now to be screwed over with a rise in my fares of about 20 per cent each week — $350 a year.

If my landlord tried to put my rent up by 20 per cent, I’d hand back the keys.

Sure, some enterprising people, the so-called “Opal runners”, gamed the system by getting to eight trips the cheapest way possible. But are we non-runners being punished for their entrepreneurial spirit?

And something else stinks. The change has the distinct whiff of a loss leader about it; a special that was never designed to be in place forever, just long enough to get you in the shop. Or, in this case, onto the card.

I know, Melburnians, you have no sympathy for us Sydneysiders. Whining about the loss of something you never had in the first place.

The government has not completely taken the reward away. Now after eight trips, you’ll get half price journeys. But once you’ve tasted the best, the rest just seems a bit stingy.

The government slyly says fares are frozen when they know for hundreds of thousands of Sydneysiders they’re actually going up.

So, farewell zeros, it was fun to take advantage of you and wander around the state on the weekend. Now we’ll have to get used to halfies and staying indoors more.