Re: Yarra Trams Article in Sunday Age

["Dave Proctor" <daproc@spambait.ozemail.com.au>]

"Railvic" <railvic@primus.com.au> wrote in message
3A7679A3.1AFED2D0@primus.com.au">news:3A7679A3.1AFED2D0@primus.com.au...

> Can you suggest how to make "easy to buy tickets and relatively hard to
> evade" then the current setup?  You let the machine know the type of
> ticket you need, insert your payment, then collect your ticket.  How
> hard is that and it is no different than buying tickets from a person?
> It is interesting to see people have no trouble using bank ATMs or play
> a pokie machine, but have such great difficulty in using ticket machines

Yeah, this is the argument that annoys me. It is not too difficult to buy
tickets on board, and if, as some people have argued, people do not know,
why not conduct an education campaign? Ads on TV, in newspapers, letterbox
drops, etc.

> ...  Furthermore, the range of tickets available have not changed from
> the pre-automated ticketing days

Actually, they have - you could buy daily tickets before off a conductor,
you can't now.

> and the zone tickets are not new in Melbourne either!!

Just as an exercise, I took a couple of umpiring friends out for the day -
one from Sydney, one from Auckland, and one from New York - and I let them
try and figure out the ticket we needed to get to Puffing Billy from North
Melbourne - I gave them a brochure detailing the fare system, and they were
able to do so, without any assistance from me. So it is not as hard as
people make it out to be.

Dave