Melbourne's Free PT Month: A Taste of What Could Be
There’s something genuinely different about Melbourne right now. If you’ve been catching trams or trains this past month, you’ve probably felt it too — a kind of lightness in how people move around the city. No fumbling for a Myki at the door, no awkward shuffle while someone discovers their card is two dollars short, no ticket inspectors giving you the look as you board. Just… getting on and going where you need to go.
It sounds small, but it genuinely isn’t.
I’ve been reading through what people are saying online about the experience, and it’s striking how consistently the same themes come up. The flow is better. The vibe is calmer. One person summed it up perfectly — it just feels more like what public transport is supposed to be. Less of a toll gate, more of a civic service. And honestly, after years of watching Myki chew through people’s mornings at tram stops, I reckon they’re onto something.
Speaking of Myki — can we talk about ticket inspectors for a moment? Someone shared a story that made my blood boil a little. They’d just stepped onto a tram, were literally in the process of topping up their card, when a group of inspectors descended on them like they’d committed an actual crime. Three of them. Cornering a single person. Demanding they open their banking app to verify their address. Their banking app. That is an extraordinary overstep, and frankly, nobody should ever feel compelled to do that. The person eventually got their fine waived on appeal, which is good, but the fact that it escalated that far — and that someone else in the same thread mentioned being too shaken to even challenge a similar fine — tells you something about how the enforcement culture around ticketing can go wrong. Free PT, even temporarily, removes that entire dynamic. And good riddance to it.
The broader debate this has sparked is the interesting bit, though. There’s a genuine conversation happening about whether we should just… make it free permanently. And the arguments aren’t as wild as they might initially sound. When you factor in the cost of the Myki infrastructure, the contractor payments (apparently somewhere around a quarter of all fare revenue goes straight back to the ticketing system operator), and the administrative overhead of running a fare collection system, the actual net revenue from tickets starts to look a lot less impressive. Someone did rough maths suggesting the system might not be that far off breaking even if you scrapped fares entirely, when you account for all those costs plus the economic benefits of fewer cars on the road.
Now, I’m not an economist, and I’m genuinely uncertain whether full fare-free PT is the right call for Melbourne long-term. The $70 million a month figure being thrown around is real money, and anyone who waves that away with “just tax the rich” is being a bit breezy about it. But the current setup — where we spend enormous resources building and maintaining a ticketing bureaucracy while still only covering a fraction of the actual operating cost through fares anyway — does invite the question of whether the juice is worth the squeeze.
What I am fairly confident about is that the V/Line situation during this free period is a useful cautionary tale. Regional trains have apparently been chaotic — overcrowded, with people rushing doors and general passenger behaviour taking a nosedive. That suggests free PT isn’t a magic fix on its own; you need the capacity and frequency to back it up. Free but unreliable and overcrowded isn’t much of an improvement.
Federation Square got a mention in some of the discussions too, in the context of Melbourne’s complicated relationship with genuine public space — the city was apparently designed without a central square partly to discourage organised gatherings. There’s a pleasing irony that free public transport kind of achieves something similar to what a great public square does: it makes the city feel like it belongs to everyone, not just the people who can afford to navigate it comfortably.
Maybe that’s what’s really behind the good vibes this month. It’s not just the convenience. It’s the feeling — even briefly — that the city isn’t constantly asking you to prove you’ve paid your dues just to exist in it.
Whether that continues after May 1st remains to be seen. But at minimum, I hope whoever makes these decisions is paying attention to how different Melbourne has felt. That’s worth something.