Cost of living: Free public transport for five weeks over summer in WA
Cost of living: Free public transport for five weeks over summer in WA
Western Australia residents will see some cost-of-living relief after the state government makes public tr...
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Its nice when they do things like this. But i'd like to know whether there's an appreciable boost to ridership.
Also cost of living relief? Its just pandering with poorly targeted short term subsidies, no underlying issues are solved by this. They'd be better to make a splashy ad campaign like the 'Easy Rider Summer', not linking the free public transport to cost of living at all.
Result: No pollies pandering to the general eye rolls of the citizenry; instead people think government does unexpected, but cool stuff occassionally.
5 weeks free transport is an incentive for people to try public transport again, if they have not done so for a long time. This may make them switch to train or bus permanently, taking some rush-hour cars off the roads.
Anyone who is having to work straight through the summer months(ie. not able to take a long holiday), would be just the group needing this kind of assistance.
There are plenty of spare seats on most buses. Increasing the patronage of them would be a benefit.
As a kid I would have taken advantage of this. The fare cost to Perth or Freo was more money that could have gone towards enjoying a day out.
This is all conjecture and I'd be keen to see, either way, whether their is an increase in ridership over the 5 weeks, comparable to previous years.
The big question is... are the ferries free too?
Yes, ferries are included in the free travel from Dec 24th - Jan 28th. (A Smartrider is required to take these free travel trips on any service)
I would really love this to be part of a bigger ongoing plan to boost ridership again. Last i heard it hasn't rebounded since Covid still. But i don't know that 5 weeks free ridership would be enough on it's own to set peoples habits.
Totally agree with workers through the holidays, and teenagers going out, would be some of the people to naturally benefit the most from this.
I might just have to go catch the ferry this summer then. I read a little while ago there are calls to increase the numbers and stops of the ferry system it could be a good, and cheaper addition to the PT network
In Melbourne, our Public Transport Users Association posted an article a while back debunking the argument that free public transport would massively boost ridership. Although it's not entirely applicable here, as the article was written in regards to permanently free PT (and also because Perth is an entirely different city with different geography, density, and transport modes to Melbourne), it's still a fairly interesting article: https://www.ptua.org.au/myths/free/
And we also capped our regional fares at $10 a day (to get anywhere in the stats), and while I can't find any exact stats, ridership has exploded, way exceeding station and train capacity
I'm not sure how expensive transport fares in Perth work out to be, but I imagine there will be some increase. But I also imagine that the people who don't commute by PT will continue not to commute by PT, and the people who already do will probably continue, although rather than going work > home, they might take the bus to a beach then go home or something like that
I do agree though this won't really help with much. I mean, if I was in Perth, I'd still take advantage of it, but I'm a transport nerd who'll sit at a bus stop for 3 hours just to have a minor chance of seeing a specific bus. I'm not exactly going to be that representative
You'd have loved to be at my local bus station a month or so ago. I saw one of the early 2000's, maybe 1990's transperth buses roll up. It was very cool to see, and nice they've kept one of those for posterity's sake.
I think that PTUA's argument would be fairly applicable in many places. Because in the first instance i'd assume its about changing commuter behaviour and preferences. I think cost would come after, as a secondary consideration.
That regional fare capping is very cool! We should do that over here, but with Qantas. ;) Just joking, that would be a greenhouse disaster for the amount of flight demand that would generate.
I definitely would've. Something similar happened back in 2019 on my local bus route, we usually had fairly modern low floor CDC buses, but one really hot day we just had a random high floor bus, similar to the one in your photo though with a digital headboard (like this). To date, it's one of the very few high floors I've seen operating on a suburban route in melbourne.
And yeah, before behaviours even begin to change, the service needs to exist. Although there will always be elitists who will refuse to take public transport, I do think many people would be willing to commute to and from work by PT if it was as convenient and similarly priced to driving. Cost does come 2nd as you said, but making it free to go anywhere you want doesn't help if you can't even get where you want to go!
The fare cap is really awesome, although I do wish they'd improved capacity a bit more first (it's simmered down a bit, but all the trains and buses used to be crushed to capacity!)
The bus i saw was like this one,
It's a wise move by the government. It's a time of year when utilisation is normally well below average. At the same time, most of the period in question is normal operating hours.
So, all the services are running, but a fraction of the usual passenger capacity.
This will fill some of those services a bit while not hurting revenue too much.
The bus i saw, was like this one,
