I want to do an experiment. The basic premise of the Opal Card in regards to weekly expenses is that after your eighth paid journeys, all subsequent uses of public transport are free. This is on top of a $15 daily cap, so the maximum one will pay per week is $60. A journey is considered a trip or transfer without a break longer than an hour - so if you hop from a bus to a train straight away, it is one journey and one transfer, if you get a coffee and lunch for an hour in between the bus and the train, it is two separate journeys. Note the use of the word paid in eighth paid journeys, meaning that any journeys done after youve reached your $15 daily cap do not contribute to the eight journeys that qualify you for free travel the rest of the week. Part-paid journeys count. The cheapest fare you can possibly get on the network is a bus fare, 1-3 sections for $2.10. A $15 daily cap will see you get seven $2.10 journeys ($14.70) and an eighth journey that will cost you $0.30, provided you leave a minimum one hour gap between each bus ride. As all journeys were paid (or partly-paid) for, they all counted towards the eight journeys a week cap. Now if you are really bored enough to spend a day hopping on buses for short distances with a minimum one hour gap in between, it is entirely possible to get an entire weeks worth of free public transport travel for a mere $15 as you will have completed all eight journeys on the same day. It will, however, involve about ten hours of patience, being able to catch only one bus per hour for less than 3km distance. I will assume that the system designers did take this into consideration; however it is permitted because it is self-defeating - almost nobody will be bothered enough to actually partake in such far-fetched shenanigans. This saves you $45/week and only takes 10 hours work meaning you are effectively being paid $4.50/hour to save on public transport costs for the week in a system that is actually pretty cheap already compared to other first-world cities... so unless you are an extreme cheapskate who will leech the already heavily-subsidized system to its last drop, it really isnt worth the effort but I just thought all this up and typed it all out so Ill post it anyway because otherwise Ill have wasted considerable time typing all this crap out. EDIT: So it seems that a similar idea has actually been considered and even posted on the Opal site itself - a person catching two buses a day exclusively within the zone 1 band will pay a maximum $16.80 (8x2.10) per week and all use of public transport for the rest of the week will be free of charge. This effectively verifies my theory; however following Opals suggestion involves not using public transport outside these two journeys a day (at least for four days a week), so my experiment still holds validity - you can perhaps do this on a Sunday so your weeks travel to actual work is free and you save $1.80 over a normal, sane person in a zone 1 bus band with better things to do on their Sundays.
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 13:39:49 +0000