Transport Officers, checking your opal card please.
An intrusive voice breaks the silence of the peaceful train. A flickering anxiety ignites within you as you fumble around for your Opal card and crucially, your student ID card. Fuck. You left it in your pencil case, a pencil case which sits so innocently on your desk at home. A minacious face glares back at you like a wolf spotting a lamb in an open field. Do you have proof of concession? Hopeless justifications, desperately showing your Canvas, here look, this is my library card on my USYD app. But alas, no mercy was given. You are faced with a warning on your records or worse, an overbearing unnecessary $200 fine.
The NSW Opal system, for students in particular, remains a strained and highly bureaucratic system. The combination of easily misplaced physical cards, aggressive transport officers, hefty undeserving fines and for some, inaccessibility to concession fares means that the ride to university and back home is easily soured.
Currently, Opal cards are not digitalised but contactless payment options, such as Apple Pay or Google Wallet, are a convenient alternative. These methods however, do not provide the same benefits as Opal does like free parking at select stations, travel caps, transfer discounts and most importantly, concession fares. Now, your average commuter will have forgotten their Opal cards once or twice on the way somewhere and have to likely forgo benefits like free parking but as a concession holder, you also lose out on concession fares which are 50% of the adult ones.
The uncharitable part here, however, is that if you had your concession Opal card and by chance no proof of concession, you would still have to opt for these alternative methods and pay full fare just to avoid a $200 fine. Talks of including digital payment options for concessions seem to be covered by former NSW Treasurer’s Matt Keans $568 million investment into the Opal Next Gen Program but the more immediate issue of transport officers hounding down on travelling students receive almost zero attention.
Travelling on public transport in NSW without being able to produce your proof of entitlement is considered an offence and results in a fine for fare evasion. Transport NSW requires concession Opal cardholders to have either a concession entitlement card, which includes a student’s name, university, and student ID number or, for select universities,a student ID card when travelling. Unlike a student ID card, however, concession entitlement cards do not have photo identification. Everyone also knows that transport officers spend little to no time to properly inspect a student’s photo to their face, rather, just briefly scanning to see whether it is a university-issued ID. This suggests that all they really need to do is check whether you are a student or not. Yet, the Canvas app, university apps or photos of one’s student ID card remains to be an insufficient form of proof despite still being evidence that a commuter is indeed a student.
Students who have been issued a caution or a fine for this before generally do not have the intention to not bring their student ID card rather for the most occasions genuinely forgotten or misplaced them. Such an event can happen once or twice over the course of their degree and it seems rather unfair that on the third or even second time, depending on which transport officer you get that day, you will be harshly punished with a $200 fine. For perspective, $200 is roughly equivalent to ten weeks of routine travel. It is incredibly excessive and undeserved especially for students who study full-time and barely have a consistent income.Additionally, a concession Opal card isn’t easy to get. The application is completed by the university and it takes time for Transport NSW to process and approve it. It begs the question that despite such an extensive process, why then are there no other avenues for Transport Officers to check whether a student without proof of concession is eligible or not?
Transport officers are inconsistent and, as per multiple student accounts, aggressive. With some officers being laxed and others increasingly perverse in their treatment towards commuters, it remains unacceptable that such an experience must be tolerated during their journey. As we move to modernise our transport systems, the harmless mistake of forgetting a student ID card should not be punished, these transport officers should just be able to look at my Canvas app and say, ‘Yep you’re a poor student alright’ and move on.
