Public transport apps – the missing section
Our rather awful bus pricing is based on the number of ‘sections’ that you travel. According to the Sydney Buses website a section is about 1.6km. The way to calculate how much a trip will cost you, and which ticket you should use, is to download a PDF file and count the sections your trip will cover – or ask the bus driver.
Now, surely, this is something that the various transport apps should be dealing with? I would see that as a real bonus if, when looking up a trip, it also told me how many sections the trip covered.
The sections thing completely baffles me. And sections aren’t geographic – they depend on the route your taking (as best as I can tell anyway). While the new ticketing system should remove the question of how many sections you’ve travelled, it would be nice to see the authorities use the switch as an excuse to greatly simplify this system.
I hear you. We approximate the sections in our TripGo app and have been lobbying the transport department for quite a while to provide us with accurate information for where sections start. Extracting it from the PDFs is a pain. Props to you for raising this issue!