Melbourne - Metcard validation before every trip

[glenn@werple.net.au (Glenn Capuano)]

The PTC have now set up the Metcard barrier gates (when leaving the
station) to reject any tickets which haven't been validated on the
same day. This includes weeklies and monthlies which are perfectly
valid, but they won't let you through the gates any more if they
haven't been previously validated that day. At Flagstaff station on
Tuesday morning they had "revenue protection officers" lecturing all
the weeklies and monthlies like me who only validate their ticket once
a month, and herding us through the "All other tickets" gate.

As far as I can see (from some experimentation at an unmanned gate at
Museum), the machines are now set up so that when going out of a
station they effectively act as "devalidators", checking if the ticket
has been validated that day, and if so, removing that validation, as
if the ticket has never been validated at all (the machine says "Not
Valid" when it rejects any ticket not validated either that day or
since the last devalidation, which is completely untrue in the case of
monthlies.

I'd be interested to know if the machines have always been set up this
way and the PTC have just activated the function, or if it's something
they rushed in at the last minute when they realised that there was no
trip stats coming out of the system. It's interesting that it came
less than a week after the City Weekly's article stating that it was
perfectly legal not to validate every trip. I did hear one of the RPOs
on Tuesday morning saying that he'd only been told about it that
morning.

This is a monumental pain. Yet another burden in an already user
unfriendly system. I wonder how long the cards will hold out with all
this validation. Anyone know if/when Metcard Xpress is going to
arrive?


Glenn
kappa@netspace.net.au