David Kellam

According to The Age, The Victorial Liberals plan to make public transport free for students (pretty much any eligible concession card holder). Fantastic in principle. Great if you own the Infrastructure. Terrible if you don’t.

Using the $285m figure over 4 years to provide free public transport to 90,000 students (all data sourced from the article. Accuracy not guaranteed). This equates to $792 per student per year. This is $295 higher than 12 x Zone 1 monthly tickets. Zone 1&2 would cost $916.80. My guess is they’re using rough geographic data to determine who’s in zone 1 (most), zone 2 (lots) & zone 3 (a few). They come up with an average of $792 per student per year. What about the students who don’t use enough to justify a yearly (12xmonthly) ticket? Options:

1. Let them apply for reimbursement
2. Build that into the formula
3. Use real ticket validation data to determine real cost
4. No longer require a concession holder to purchase/be given a ticket

You can pretty much guarantee they’ll be using option 4. If they’re smart they’ll use 2 - use existing ticketing data to predict average trips, etc. I’ll wager the machines can recognise concession/full-fare travel already. It’s probably built into the ticket ID.

Now, if the public transport system were under government control, you wouldn’t have to worry about any of this. Sure, they still would, but only from an internal budgetary perspective. The net government cost and societal benefit would be the same. Under the public/private model, the real opportunity cost is too difficult to determine, too costly or else nobody really cares beyond the promise.

This is just one reason why The Government should reappropriate public transport and re-evaluate public/private partnerships for anything involving a per-user subsidy.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 23rd, 2006 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.