Re: Melbourne's Automated Ticketing

["Roderick Smith" <rodsmith@werple.net.au>]

Warszawa is in a group of cities where the expectation is that people will
have a stock of tickets in advance, bought at off-tram booths.  The
majority of customers travel with periodical tickets.  Only a few stops
have ticket machines, with the ticketing types and prices labelled clearly
with pictographs.  This works partly because all journeys are at flat rate,
and are not multimodal.  It also works because there are booths everywhere,
something not prevalent in Australian culture.  It is certainly confusing
for a visitor.

Melbourne is supposedly designing a system for mutimodal travel with
different fare types.  It has fitted trams with machines not capable of
selling the range.  This is quite a legitimate complaint, particularly as
the problem is caused by government policy, and not by technical
limitations of the machines.  It is a further example of the government's
intention to criminalise public transport, as evidenced by the recent
decoration of Camberwell station with fencing removed from the
decommissioned Pentridge Prison.

The better European tram systems are in Germany: on board tvms capable of
selling all fare types.

The better tvms have multilingual instructions offered on display screens,
common with European atms too.  A Pole visiting Melbourne would have little
luck buying a ticket with the Melbourne system.

-- 
Regards
Roderick Smith
Rail News Victoria Editor

Anthony Tubbs <atubbs@ozramp.net.au> wrote in article
<34c85d63.4234226@news.mpx.com.au>...
> Will people stop moaning about the automated ticketing system now
> being introduced on the public transport system. If you went to Europe
> and wanted to use to trams in Warsaw you would be confronted with a
> ticket machine and the instructions aren't in english. What would you
> do?  At least here the instructions for use are well set out in
> english. The ticketing system is here to stay so you better get use to
> it.