If there’s one thing more quintessential to the experience of being a Melburnian other than coffee snobbery, AFL fanaticism, or rarely daring to cross the Yarra, it’s a shared loathing of the Myki public transport ticketing system.
The plastic smartcard nuisance has been in full-time operation for around 3 years now, and yet you can probably count on one hand the amount of people who know exactly how much they’re paying each time they touch on.
But if you thought the unreliable system, confusing fare structure, even more confusing touch on/touch off rules, and constantly malfunctioning equipment would’ve been enough to impel Public Transport Victoria to pump the brakes on sending out ticket inspectors, you’d be dead wrong.
In fact new stats show that if anything, they’ve significantly increased the amount you’re-not-actually-police personnel on public transport.
Figures from the 2013-14 financial year show that Authorised Officers issued 158,607 infringement notices to commuters.
But in the 2014-15 financial year, that number didn’t just increase slightly, it increased by just under one hundred thousand.
That’s nearly 100,000 MORE fines and infringements handed to passengers than in the 12 months prior.
One of the reasons for the increase has a lot to do with PTV giving ticket inspectors portable EFTPOS machines and introducing on-the-spot fine options. The thinking there, more than likely, being that people would be more inclined to pay the smaller fine on the spot to “get it over and done with,” rather than go through the murk of dealing with the much-larger mail fines and potentially contesting them through the Magistrate’s Court – even though a huge number of fines fall over in court under even the smallest amount of legal pressure.
The other reason for the enormous jump in fines was a significant increase in man-power and man-hours, with hugely increased amounts of transport officers on the public transport routes as part of a supposed crackdown on fare evading.
In the 2014-15 financial year alone, 181,582 ticket infringement notices were issued. And on top of that, 76,291 on-the-spot fines were collected.
Any which way you spin it, that’s a hell of a lot of extra bread for the highly beleaguered PTV.
They’re not slowing down, either. For the current financial year, stats show that 70,056 infringement notices and 46,866 on-the-spot fines have been handed out. And that’s just up to the end of January.
And yet, despite graffiti’d, scratched, malfunctioning, irregular, and unreliable equipment in use *literally* across the entire network, Myki inspectors still operate under a zero-tolerance policy and assume everyone knows the intimate intricacies of its network, and operate under the belief that all machines are operational at all times. No warnings. No honest mistakes. No “no fault of my own” clause.
More like touch on, fuck right off.
Source: The Age.
Photo: Michael Dodge/Getty.
