Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
just don’t see why it has become such an ordeal when there are many examples in the world that work.
Mix well a fragmented bunch of providers who have no contractual obligation to make it easy, combing with one owned by a company that has a competing product (and didn't win the tender), then add a meddling Minister as the icing on a cluster-fuck cake.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Tamara,
I use HOP and it’s a big improvement on the old system but still slower than it should be
You mean the real HOP, not the bastard Snapper hybrid?
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Sacha,
neoliberal approaches that regard people as fundamentally untrustworthy and needing to be charged fees to motivate responsible behaviour.
It's not even anything to do with being trustworthy. The issue isn't vandalism or other abuse, it's a lack of concern about existence or quality. Make public transport fare-free but reduce services to hourly and the response "You're not paying for it, so why do you care?" comes into play, and not just from detractors.
It's a fundamental human need to attach value to things.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Sacha,
lest bored hordes ride the buses all day and night
Apparently the Link drivers start to get grumpy if one sits on the bus for a few complete circuits. I don't know why they should give a damn (outside peak hour, of course), but people I know who've done the loop (in the days of there only being the Green Link) report getting asked to vacate.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to George Darroch,
Matthew, isn’t it the case that money topped up on Hop or any other device accrues immediately to the organisation running the device? In which case the money stored on the prepaid device becomes a large float. How this is accounted for with respect to real expected future costs is a matter for the accountants, but it could be that this buffer constitutes an interest free loan.
Yes, pretty much. Was having this discussion with my brother just this morning. In theory the money is not the provider’s until you’ve claimed a transport trip (ETA: hence my statement to Sofie about needing a way to transfer the value to the provider), but as there’s no provision to have money refunded I don’t know exactly how the technicalities add up.
It’s a large cash asset that offsets an equal-sized liability that’s recorded as “prepayments”. In Infratil’s case, that means a private, profit-making company can earn interest off their customers’ money and return it to shareholders. The same will be true of Auckland Transport when HOP is fully online, no doubt, but I’m much more comfortable with a public body (and all its accompanying oversight) holding the money and accruing the interest.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Steve Barnes,
Provision of free public transport is a discussion that would be worth having in this country, but we're a long, long way away from it being in any way fruitful. Direct subsidies are communist evils, you understand, and we can't be having any of that. Much better to hide the subsidies to road users by transferring externalities onto the taxpayer and then spend billions of dollars on roads. For what's being wasted on the Roads of Dubious Significance we could have fare-free public transport across the entire country for many, many years.
However, given the evidence that no value is attached to things that are given away, it would still be better to have at least nominal fares. Detach their cost from any kind of farebox recovery, but charge something.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
What’s wrong with that though?
Nothing, but there still needs to be infrastructure on the buses and train (platforms) to take care of that revenue transfer to the transport provider. EFTPOS takes a very, very long time. Even Snapper takes too long (over a second) to read the card for use in really high-volume scenarios. Imagine 700 people trying to pass through a barrier that takes over a second per person just to read their card before opening the gate, which is the situation that'll be faced at Britomart once this is rolled out on trains here.
I'm really getting confused at your objections to this system.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Geez ,that’s not very nice.
It may not have been the politest of wording, but it's incredibly frustrating when an organisation that's trying to improve provision of services to its largely-working class clientèle gets smacked with the "anti-worker" stick.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Using eftpos (just as a phone can be topped up at a convenience store) to purchase combinations for the month via a convenience (am liking that word ;) store seems perfectly adequate to me.
But all you've done there is transfer your money from one thing (your bank account) to another thing (the "combinations", whatever they are). There still needs to be a way to get the money in as revenue for the transport providers (unless these "combinations" are a monthly pass that you just wave in front of a fare collector?). If I use EFTPOS to top up my HOP card, it's not revenue for the transport provider until I complete a tag-on/tag-off transaction, likewise any other stored-value fare system.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Increased employment and customer convenience, so it got dumped.
Works just fine if your vehicle isn't packed to bursting and has more than one entry. Which is to say, it's useless for peak-hour trains in Auckland (where it's often impossible for train staff to collect tickets at present) and since buses in this country only operate with front-door embarkation it still leaves the entryway as a choke-point.
IOW, fuck your anti-employment "conspiracy" and look at the wider issue of getting maximum revenue (uncollected tickets==lost revenue) while improving journey speeds (time spent getting passengers on board is time not spent moving). I know that the revenue argument is unlikely to wash much with you, but in the model we have it's something that's important.