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jpatokal / opal_or_not

Public transport fare comparison engine
http://opalornot.com
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
18 stars 1 forks source link

Quarterly/Yearly ticket comparisons unfair #7

Open Jeremy512 opened 10 years ago

Jeremy512 commented 10 years ago

A typical Australian worker has four weeks' annual leave. Therefore, a yearly ticket should be compared to 48 weeklies, and a quarterly ticket should be compared on the basis of 12 weekies. Since Opal is pay-as-you-go, users do not pay in the weeks they are on leave.

Obviously this is still not a perfect comparison and doesn't take into account everyone, but it would be slightly fairer.

jpatokal commented 10 years ago

Hmm, not a bad idea. Quarterly tickets are currently computed as 90 days, or 12.85 weeks.

Yearly tickets are not supported at the moment, and I doubt I'll add them since they're just not realistic for most people.

subs0nic commented 10 years ago

I'm not sure I agree with the comparisons being unfair, however it might be worth providing an option to estimate how many weeks in a row you expect to travel, or maybe indicate how many weeks per quarter/year you estimate you won't be traveling?

A quarterly MyTrain ticket costs the same as 10 paper weeklies (ie ~3 free weeks included). A yearly MyTrain ticket costs the same as 40 paper weeklies (ie ~12 free weeks included).

For a quarterly MyTrain ticket, you'd need to take at least 3 weeks off during your quarterly ticket period to be better off under Opal. For the yearly ticket (or buying 4 quarterly's a year) you'd need 12 weeks of leave - much more than the average of 4 weeks.

This comparison assumes peak travel only and doesn't take off-peak Opal discounts into consideration.

Also a much nicer calculation for Quarterly tickets is 91 days or exactly 13 weeks, but to get 91 days you need to purchase the ticket after 3pm (so it's really more like 1 afternoon + 90 days)

jayrsmith commented 10 years ago

"Yearly tickets...just not realistic for most people."

Not disagreeing but you may not be aware some organisations buy these tickets for their staff. In their fortnightly (or regular) pay the staff members pay a proportion of the ticket. Leads to decent discounts over paying for your own MyMulti weekly tickets.