Despite allowing school children to travel free as a move to ease cost-of-living pressures, Transperth has fined more than 1,300 students for not having a valid ticket.
Transperth has handed out more than 1,300 fines to school students for travelling without tickets, at the same time as offering them free public transport. "Accurate patronage data is essential in helping us run the network efficiently and track the effectiveness of initiatives like this," spokesman David Hynes said in a statement.
"The number of infringements issued since the start of the program is less than 1,400, which represents just 0.018 per cent of the more than 7.3 million student SmartRider boardings in the same period." "It would have been much fairer and much more reasonable to at least give warnings, and certainly encouragement towards SmartRiders."The PTA did not answer questions from the ABC about how many infringements had subsequently been appealed or cancelled.
"This idea that you jump straight in and start fining children is deeply counterproductive," he said."What you want is people seeing public transport as a good, easy, friendly alternative to using cars. And unfortunately, I think this just makes public transport one of those things that you're in danger of actually children having bad experiences with not using later in life.