Free bus travel

We have a new ticketing system on public transport in south east Queensland, it's called Go card. You can use your Go card on the buses, the trains and the ferries.

When they first started bringing them in, they announced the fact that they would be ending the ten-trippers. Now I liked the ten-tripper. It was a paper ticket, with the numbers 1 to 10 on it. You'd get on the bus, the driver would punch your ticket, you'd go and sit down. Sometimes, the driver wouldn't punch the ticket properly, so on your next trip the same number would get punched because that driver didn't notice. I've had up to fourteen trips on one ten tripper before.

Last week I bought a Go card and I used it for the first time today. I got on the bus, touched on, got a green light and went and sat down, after telling the driver where you can buy the cards. A lot of people have been asking where they can get the cards, but no-one thought to tell the drivers. When I got off, I whipped out my card again and touched off. More about that later.

When I came home this afternoon I went to touch on and there was no green light. You see the system works through a GPS. It knows what stop you're at using satellite navigation. It was raining this afternoon and the GPS wouldn't work. Apparently it won't work in the underground bus station on Queen Street either, so a lot of people have been getting free rides as a result. That's what happened to me, the driver said not to bother and I got a free ride. It's not my fault, nor the driver's if the system doesn't work properly.

The idea with touching on and touching off is that when you touch on, the system charges your card a fixed price of three dollars. That way they don't lose too much revenue if you forget to touch off. When you get to your destination, you touch off, then the sytem knows how far you've travelled and it corrects the amount it needs to charge you. The thing is though, it costs me $4.10 for a single to the city. If you aren't very good at maths forgetting to touch off saves me $1.10.

Of course it depends when during the week I do it. After six trips in a week, the fair drops 50% for the rest of the week, so if I forgot to touch off on a Thursday, I'd be paying 95c more.

I can definitely see plenty of ways the new system can be cheated. Not that I'd do that, not deliberately anyway.