Project Description

In 1997, the Government of Victoria privatised Victoria's public transport system as an integral stage in the reform of the transport system. During and after this privatisation process, it was the intention of the Government to retain the existing multimodal MET ticketing system as the primary means of ticketing (although individual operators would also have the opportunity to introduce single-company tickets for those trips which did not need to take advantage of the multimodal benefits of the MET ticketing system). In such an arrangement, all revenue from the sale of MET tickets went to a Revenue Clearing House, which then distributed it to the operating companies according to a revenue allocation process which recognised the passenger loads carried by each of the operators.

The Transport Research Centre was commissioned by the Transport Reform Unit in late-1997 to undertake the design and conduct of Customer Surveys on the Victorian public transport system to support the revenue allocation process. The Urban Transport Institute had a continuing role after mid-1998 in the analysis of the data collected in the survey. The Public Transport Revenue Allocation Survey (PUTRAS) was used to support the calculation of fare-box revenue allocations to each of the companies operating public transport services under the privatised system arrangements. The revenue allocation process used a procedure whereby passenger loadings (trips and distance covered) on each property were estimated by first calculating usage factors for each of the major ticket types sold in Melbourne (i.e. by ticket type and by ticket zone) for each property. These usage factors were then applied to the sales of the various types of tickets in each time period to estimate passenger loadings. These loadings were then used in a Revenue Allocation Formula to calculate the distribution of the fare-box revenue to each of the operators.