Is $20 a reasonable fare for the Melbourne Airport Rail Link?
When governments are willing to commit upwards of $10 billion and the private sector is willing to tip in a further $5 billion, it's safe to say Melbourne Airport's long-awaited airport link will happen.
What shape or form the link will take is another question altogether.
Securing the best corridor for the track, placing an appropriate amount of stations along the line and figuring out an optimal frequency of service are all important tasks, however another is setting the correct fare level and ensuring there's enough connectivity to make the link a success from day one.
Many people would be familiar with how fares are set for Sydney and Brisbane's airport trains - Sydney has an airport access fee ($14.30 on top of the distance-based fare) and Brisbane adds a surcharge on top of its zone-based fare system - but there are also relevant & recent international examples of new airport rail links.
In 2015 Toronto was scratched off the list the PTUA maintains of large airports without a rail link when it opened the Union-Pearson Express; a four station service between Union Station in central Toronto, two suburban stations which connect with various other public transport services and the final station at Toronto's Pearson International airport.
It's a dedicated airport service running on a frequency of four trains an hour - every 15 minutes - and the journey takes 25 minutes. As I've written before, the similarities between Melbourne & Tullamarine and Toronto & Pearson are uncanny. The service is operated by the Ontario provincial level agency Metrolinx which is similar to PTV.
When it began operating, one-way fares were set to an eye-wateringly high $27.50CAD if you paid with cash or if you used the local smart card, called Presto, the fare was $19.00CAD. The Australian and Canadian dollars for the past decade have ebbed and flowed around parity, the current exchange rate is $1AUD = $0.94CAD.
Local and national Canadian press back in early 2016 reported on the patronage slump after the Pan-American games were held in Toronto (2015) citing fare levels as culprit. A year after substandard patronage performance, fares were slashed by over 50% to $12.00 CAD if paying by cash or $9.,00CAD if using the local smart card.
Not surprisingly patronage trebled after the fare cuts and more people started using the service between the two intermediate suburban stations and Union in central Toronto.
The AirRail Melbourne proposal unveiled last weekend came with a projected fare that is likely to be 'under $20'. The current skybus fare is $18. Compare with a myki money zone 1 & 2, 2 hour fare: $4.30 (or a daily $8.60).
It's not inconceivable that the overwhelming majority of people who will use the Melbourne Airport Rail Link will use another public transport service to get to an Airport Link station and therefore will either be paying the 2 hour or daily myki fare as well as the fare to the airport - just like how passengers need to pay the myki and skybus fares separately now.
A $20 airport link fare plus $4.30-$8.60 is putting the total cost of getting to the airport via public transport into the mid 20s, almost $30 category, similar to the fares that Toronto started with (for balance, Toronto's TTC subways, trams and buses operate on pay-per journey basis, it costs $3.00CAD for each journey).
Aside from fares, there are other lessons to learn from the Toronto experience, as outlined in this article by Jarrett Walker. Although the Melbourne Airport Rail Link will likely tick Jarrett's a few boxes on that articles list - namely ensuring the rail line serves more than one destination.
However should the Melbourne Airport Rail Link as we understand it to run from the city to Sunshine and the airport also extend to Broadmeadows to maximise connections from day one?
"Combine air travelers and airport employees on the same train/bus" is one of Jarrett's key points - Sunshine ensures employees living immediately west of the airport will have an easy connection, adding Broadmeadows will ensure airport employees living anywhere between Moonee Ponds and Craigieburn have an easy connection.
The Suburban Rail Loop would extend that connectivity to both employee and passenger alike to the rest of northern and north-eastern Melbourne.
Lead image credit: Marcus Wong.
