Sydney doesn’t have trolleys, except in supermarkets and department stores.
I think they mean Trams. But apart from that I have no idea what they’re referring to.
Thanks for that, and thanks to everyone else who recommended the Manly ferry. I left the office fairly late so I wasn’t sure if I was going to do this, but in the end just went for it. I had a nice leisurely dinner with some good beers at 4 Pines before heading back on the last ferry. It was a good night for it: partially cloudy with some pretty spectacular cloud coloring over the skyline.
Something to do with Opal Cards (the pre-paid contactless cards used for paying fares on public transport in NSW) maybe? That would make sense in the context of trams.
I had this strange vision of someone trying to use their credit or debit card to get a trolley from the rack at the supermarket or something.
There were multiple “loopholes” when the travel card (Opal card) was first introduced. Breaking up your trip (walking between very close stations), adding a mode (train + light rail), and doing lots of short cheap journeys could make your weekly costs cheaper. The government of the time encouraged customers to get the most out of their card and utilise the different rewards / loopholes that were available or worked for them. As with all fare structure changes, there were some ‘winners’ and some losers’, so they were trying to encourage people to do what they could to minimise the cost increases and increase customer buy-in. New government = new approach, and the language changed overnight. Suddenly customers weren’t being encouraged to ‘game’ the rules to their advantage but were instead being described as “cheating the system”, “fraud” and “costing taxpayers”. Fare structures were changed a little and the loopholes closed.
What you saw was one of the loopholes being used. The idea was to send someone out with tons of Opal cards, have them charge several very short, cheap trips to each card, using up the ‘trips’ so you’d reach your weekly cap sooner for less money and could then travel for the rest of that week for free. It could make quite a difference (say you had an 8 trip cap, and your normal commute involved a $5 trip. That’s $10 per day, and you’d be at $40 on Thursday when you had made enough trips to qualify for free travel for that week. Replace a few of those $5 trips with several $2 trips and suddenly you’re at under $20 for your weekly travel bill). This trip cap is now gone, so this particular strategy no longer works and what you saw happening at the light rail (tram) stops has disappeared.
I’m only a singular person, and I don’t share this account with anyone. But tram/trolley – whatever.
Thank you! I saw this in April of 2016, so I’m guessing the change you describe is more recent than this. This has been a nagging question in my mind; not life-changing, mind you, but every time I remembered it, I thought, WTF?
I was going to say “She” and then I realised I didn’t know, and panicked.