Re: Yarra Trams Article in Sunday Age

["Thomson Family" <thomson@bigpond.net.au>]

> As for your thinking you can travel without a valid ticket I think you
> should note the condtions for you to be able to do such a thing.
> section 221(2)
> (a) prior to commencing the journey or entering that land or those
premises
> he takes all reasonalbe steps to purchase a ticket; AND
>
> (b) while making the journey or being on that land or premises he has no
> reasonable oppurtunity to purchase a ticket; AND
>
> (c) on completion of the journey or on leaving that land or those premises
> he takes all reasonalbe steps to purchase a ticket.
>
> Please note that in (a) & (b)  it says AND at the end not OR.
> So in order to get section (b) to be relevant section (a) had to also be
> relevant. Not just one of them.
> Same goes for (c)
>

What is an example of when condition (a) would fail. As various people have
stated, if you plan in advance it is *always* possible to purchase a ticket
prior to travel as you could purchase a metcard from a shop/phonecall/end of
previous trip.

I don't plan ahead with regard to purchasing met tickets because firstly I
don't feel I should have to and secondly it is something I would not
consider to be a high priority until I needed to travel.

I am not an RPO/CSE (whatever) but here are what I would consider to be
cases where someone has taken reasonable steps to purchase a ticket prior to
travel:

For the case of a train:

Passenger must have potential to purchase ticket (ie have coins/notes/EFTPOS
card)

1) Machine says 'Exact Change Only' and do not have exact change,

2) First time user of station and platform only contains small machine that
does not accept cards or notes (I think it is reasonable to expect that
railway station machines will accept cards/notes),

3) Arrive at train station 5 minutes prior to train departure but due to
presence of long queue, train arrives before reaching machine. Whilst this
discussion thread has eluded that this reason is not acceptable to RPO/CSE,
I have had recent experiences late last year when my local station
(Riversdale) which is usually unstaffed was staffed by CSEs who told
passengers waiting in the ticket machine line when the train arrived to
board the train and purchase their tickets at the other end. I guess as the
CSE actually witnessed the length of queues that had formed, she was able to
use her discretion (sense) that it was not reasonable to force people to
miss their train in order to purchase their ticket after they had been
waiting in a queue for a significant period.

Ross