Oh Good, Melbourne Public Transport Bosses Want To Hire More Tram Cops

As we all know, when a plan isn’t working at all, the obvious solution is to just do it harder. Case in point, Melbourne‘s much beloved and extremely good, actually, troupe of “Authorised Officers” who the public transport network entrusts to wantonly dish out exorbitant and legally-shaky fines to anyone who fails to immediately understand Myki‘s labyrinthine system of fares.

After the Victorian city switched from a relatively straightforward paper ticketing system to a convoluted and bureaucratically overcooked smartcard network, removing the option to actually buy a ticket for the tram while standing on said tram in the process, officials were shocked to discover fare evasion spiked. Would you even believe it.

To combat that, the Authorised Officers began dishing out large fines to try and haul in the spiralling cost of fare evasion. When that didn’t work, officials implemented on-the-spot fines which saw Authorised Officers carry EFTPOS machines in an attempt to coerce riders to pay a smaller fine on the day, rather than go through the process of issuing the legally challengeable larger fine. When that didn’t work, Authorised Officers floated the idea that maybe – just maybe – they should be allowed to carry guns like they were actual police. That, quite clearly, did not work.

So now, bereft of ideas, the Rail, Tram, and Bus Union has suggested that the only way to curb fare evasion is to… hire more Authorised Officers.

Annual data from Public Transport Victoria states that fare evasion for the 2016-17 financial year cost the network $36.5million in lost revenue. That’s a leap up from $30.9million in the previous financial year.

The RTBU’s solution to this issue has apparently been to write to the state government and ask to hire as many as 100 new Authorised Officers for the network.

RTBU state secretary Luba Grigorovitch stated that the implementation of the weekend night network – in which select trams, trains, and bus routes run on a 24-hour schedule – has stretched the resources of Authorised Officers far too thin.

There’s massive fat­igue among authorised officers, particularly around the night network because of the way the rosters are operating. Since the implementation of night network in January last year, they have filled every other grade with additional staff but not enough for authorised officers. It’s too much.

Yet you still cannot buy a tram ticket at the majority of tram stops or even on-board a tram.

Extremely weird that that’s had an effect.

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