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Fremantle "FreeRider" (wasRe: Melbourne ATM's -- "touch" panels?)



On Wed, 14 Jan 1998 00:14:09 +1100, Michael Walker 

>> Getting to Museum Station, or Flinders St. with all those gates around,
>> yet only two or three are open because the Gestapo are flexing their muscles.
>> The bottleneck formed by people trying to get out is just ridiculous.
>> (And probably dangerous too. I'd like to see the Safety Map (TM) people
>> rate that one...)
>> 
>> Roll on free public transport.
>> 
>> --
>> Paul Dwerryhouse                                        paul@xenu.ee.mu.oz.au
>> "The growing use of e-mail, not to mention Web-page publishing, threatens to
>> reverse the trend towards illiteracy among the supposedly educated without at
>> the same time improving their spelling". -- Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
>
>As an interesting aside to your comment on free public transport, when I
>was in Perth on a mystery flight with my girlfriend last March, I
>collected a brochure which spoke about a system where Fremantle (or
>should that be Fr'mantle ;-)) residents received a free TransPerth
>travelpass entitling them to free travel within a bounded local area on
>public transport for a year. Does anybody have any statistics on what
>the Fremantle council pays per resident for this and whether any other
>similar schemes operate to encourage people to use public transport?
>Also, how feasible would it be for other forward thinking councils (as
>opposed to those who fight traffic problems with larger roads and bigger
>and more car parking) to undertake such a system?

The City of Fremantle (pop 25,000), where I am from, had a scheme
where residents recieved a special plastic magstripe plastic pass
which entitled free travel on Transperth services in the municipal
area.  The passes are validated like any other Multirider ticket and
the council is billed for the number of validations.

Fremantle however has a one of the worst bits of bus network I have
yet to find in an inner suburban locality of its sort.  Buses run on
eratic schedules, the route structure is confusing and city centre
termini are scatterred over several locations.  

The Fremantle City Council was always keen to see public transport
improved and better used, especially with some of the parking and
traffic problems it has.  However the only way it was able to play any
direct role was to pay for free transport for residents.

The unfortunate reality though is that a crap service is still a crap
service even if it is free.  The reason most people do not use the bus
in Fremantle is not because of price but because it just a hopeless
service to try and use (and I speak as former occasional user of local
services).

Better results could have probably been achieved if the money had been
spent on restructuring and improving the local network to be more than
a crap welfare service for those with no other choice.

Unfortunatly the institutional structures of the time did not make
this an option.  

Alex...