Where are the prices?

Public transport fares rose on 1st January.

It was a CPI(ish) rise, with rounding to the nearest 10 or 5 cents (for no good reason). The rise is small in itself, but compounds on six above-CPI rises last decade, so the Zone 1 daily fare is now $11.40 – pretty affordable for long trips, but the most expensive in the country for short trips. If it had tracked CPI, it’d be closer to $9.30. (Someone on Reddit has done the latest calculations.)

Anyway, given the rise was announced over a fortnight ago, and presumably decided upon earlier in December, wouldn’t you expect the prices to be displayed around the system by now?

They’re not. The stations, trams and buses I’ve used in the past week either have outdated information from 2025 (or even 2024!) or nothing displayed at all.

The only updated poster I’ve seen is this… with no price information on it, just a QR code.

The QR code points to this web site, after which it’s at least two more clicks to actually see the new prices.

QR codes have their place. They’ve been used recently for tram service change information at stops. Perhaps not ideal for people who don’t have smartphones, but it’s more understandable given the information changes many times through the year, and there are about 1700 tram stops to keep updated.

But for this to be used for fare information is just a little weird.

In the last 24 hours I’ve heard the new prices have started appearing on a few buses, so it appears – thankfully – the QR code fare poster won’t be permanent.

Why have it? Wild guess: there was a delay in the government making a decision, and someone thought these posters might help tide things over until they got the actual info printed and posted.

You may have also noticed the revised train network maps starting to appear. They’ll take longer because they also appear multiple times inside each train carriage.

So the maps might take a while, but hopefully the fares being on display is fixed soon.