And speaking of driving -
Today I ran out of ride slots on my last Multirider ticket, a local public transport icon which has been in place for, what, two decades or more?
The concept was fairly simple. The city was divided into zones. Normal tickets stepped up in price depending on the number of zone boundaries you crossed. With Multiriders, you purchased a little bit of cardboard (later ones were the approximate size and shape of a credit card), which was good for a certain number of N-zone trips.
There were student and pension concession versions, yadda yadda. You stuffed them into a machine at any train station or on any bus, they went 'bzip', and ate one of the remaining rides. When the last one was gone, you pitched the ticket and bought a new one.
The good thing about them was that they were faster to zap than buying a ticket at a station, and that there was a discount for buying Multiriders instead of individual tickets. They were also anonymous, discardable, and about as trackable as cash.
Because of THUH TERRISTS or some such, this system has recently been abandoned. Not content with plastering every train station and train ceiling with cameras, the new cards have the following characteristics -
- You have to buy the card separately from the ticket prices, i.e. even if you fork over cash for the ticket, you still can't actually travel anywhere until you pay more again.
- If you're a student, pensioner, or any one of a number of discount demographics, the card is registered to your name so you can be tracked by the State transport division wherever and whenever you use it.
- The card is a value card rather than a travel card, so that it's possible to transfer credit onto it, yet be unable to access that credit until you, you guessed it, pay more again.
- If you throw the card away or lose it, you become untrackable again, so they'll charge you another ten bucks for another (empty, unusable) card.
- You can "recharge" the card by a number of methods, all of which are electronically trackable back to you. Credit card, EFTPOS, Bpay, automatic bank withdrawals etc. You can't charge it using plain old cash unless you do it via a Transperth office, in which case they will simply track you manually.
- The locations for purchasing and recharging the card (except via Bpay) are severely limited. A lot of people will have to go out of their way fairly often to use this system.
- A number of stations are being transitioned to 'closed' stations, which means if you don't have one of these replacement cards on you, you can't use the station at all. You say you have cash for your ticket? Tough. No public transport for you. Go walk to the next station.
- If you don't swipe the card every time you get on AND OFF a train, your 'meter' keeps running. Bye-bye any credit on your card.
- The minimum amount you can add to a card is ten bucks, so it's not as if you can add the exact amount necessary to avoid the above scenario. Anonymity just became that much more expensive.
So, effectively, the old system was anonymous, cheap, fast, required a single swipe, had disposable tickets, and you could eschew it completely while retaining full access to all stations.
The new system is intrusive, much more infrastructure-expensive, twice as slow, has penalties for losing your chitty, adds multiple unnecessary charges wherever it can, and if you don't want to use it you're locked out of half the stations. But hey, if people can actually travel within their own city without a tracking tag, THUH TERRISTS HAV WUN.
FUCK. THAT. I'm driving from now on. And with a monthly discount parking voucher, it'll be cheaper, faster, and I can fall back to using plain old cash in any car park I want. In addition, I won't be crammed into a overheated sardine tin twice a day.
And sure, the council offering the voucher will want to know my name, but they won't be using the voucher to track me every time I enter or leave a car park.
They've got cameras for that.
The concept was fairly simple. The city was divided into zones. Normal tickets stepped up in price depending on the number of zone boundaries you crossed. With Multiriders, you purchased a little bit of cardboard (later ones were the approximate size and shape of a credit card), which was good for a certain number of N-zone trips.
There were student and pension concession versions, yadda yadda. You stuffed them into a machine at any train station or on any bus, they went 'bzip', and ate one of the remaining rides. When the last one was gone, you pitched the ticket and bought a new one.
The good thing about them was that they were faster to zap than buying a ticket at a station, and that there was a discount for buying Multiriders instead of individual tickets. They were also anonymous, discardable, and about as trackable as cash.
Because of THUH TERRISTS or some such, this system has recently been abandoned. Not content with plastering every train station and train ceiling with cameras, the new cards have the following characteristics -
- You have to buy the card separately from the ticket prices, i.e. even if you fork over cash for the ticket, you still can't actually travel anywhere until you pay more again.
- If you're a student, pensioner, or any one of a number of discount demographics, the card is registered to your name so you can be tracked by the State transport division wherever and whenever you use it.
- The card is a value card rather than a travel card, so that it's possible to transfer credit onto it, yet be unable to access that credit until you, you guessed it, pay more again.
- If you throw the card away or lose it, you become untrackable again, so they'll charge you another ten bucks for another (empty, unusable) card.
- You can "recharge" the card by a number of methods, all of which are electronically trackable back to you. Credit card, EFTPOS, Bpay, automatic bank withdrawals etc. You can't charge it using plain old cash unless you do it via a Transperth office, in which case they will simply track you manually.
- The locations for purchasing and recharging the card (except via Bpay) are severely limited. A lot of people will have to go out of their way fairly often to use this system.
- A number of stations are being transitioned to 'closed' stations, which means if you don't have one of these replacement cards on you, you can't use the station at all. You say you have cash for your ticket? Tough. No public transport for you. Go walk to the next station.
- If you don't swipe the card every time you get on AND OFF a train, your 'meter' keeps running. Bye-bye any credit on your card.
- The minimum amount you can add to a card is ten bucks, so it's not as if you can add the exact amount necessary to avoid the above scenario. Anonymity just became that much more expensive.
So, effectively, the old system was anonymous, cheap, fast, required a single swipe, had disposable tickets, and you could eschew it completely while retaining full access to all stations.
The new system is intrusive, much more infrastructure-expensive, twice as slow, has penalties for losing your chitty, adds multiple unnecessary charges wherever it can, and if you don't want to use it you're locked out of half the stations. But hey, if people can actually travel within their own city without a tracking tag, THUH TERRISTS HAV WUN.
FUCK. THAT. I'm driving from now on. And with a monthly discount parking voucher, it'll be cheaper, faster, and I can fall back to using plain old cash in any car park I want. In addition, I won't be crammed into a overheated sardine tin twice a day.
And sure, the council offering the voucher will want to know my name, but they won't be using the voucher to track me every time I enter or leave a car park.
They've got cameras for that.