Brickbats - and Bouquets !

Yesterday was the first day of Spring - and it was also the first day that it was impossible to buy a train ticket at a Sydney railway station.  To travel by train you needed to swipe an Opal card at the entry terminal - and there were predictions of chaos.   This first major test of the Opal card passed with flying colours.

The previous Labor government spent millions and decades failing to get such a system up and running.  The complexities of applying it to rail, bus and ferries was just too great, given that it also had to encompass pensioner discounts and the range of weekly, monthly and annual fares on offer.  They tried to plan it across all sectors for a single implementation - which maximised the difficulties.

Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian adopted a more cautious approach to overcome these problems.   It was first applied to the Sydney ferry system with it's much fewer passengers and this enabled the bugs to be rectified with minimum travel disruptions.   Then it was applied to the rail system, but on the basis of one rail line at a time.  The constant publicity kept it in the public eye and now that rail is covered by Opal card the system is being systematically applied to bus travel - and after that it will encompass light rail - completing the trifecta.

There are some grumbles !   Some passengers find that instead of the promised saving on fares, they are actually paying up to fifty dollars a month more for public transport.  The grading of fares is yet to come and the main impetus was to get the system up and running and that required a common fare in these early stages. Within a short time we will see the issueing of Opal cards that identify pensioners and the whole raft of fare structures that the computer can identify - and the entrancing prospect of cheap off peak travel to entice users to save money by avoiding peak times.

At the moment the main saving is speed.  Gone are the dreary queues waiting to buy paper tickets and the actual loading of passengers is much faster.  Strangely, Opal cards are not on sale at rail stations.  That was one of the predicted problems of yesterday, but it did not eventuate.   They are sold by selected outlets - usually newsagents - in nearby shopping centres and machines at stations allow the balance held in customer's accounts to be topped up.   It is evident that travellers have adapted to the need to have an Opal card in their wallets or purse.

Now that the system is up and running we can expect the fine tuning to be steadily improved.  The detractors who said it would never work in this city have been proved wrong, and yesterday a lot of people were holding their breathe - waiting to see how the day would turn out.