Tap And Go (bank card payment, aka contactless) was publicly trialled from March 2026, then there was a staggered roll out for all full fare users from June. It currently covers all metropolitan services, and all V/Line trains except for Albury, Benalla and Euroa – due to ongoing infrastructure works.

The other thing missing is country town buses outside the Myki network, and V/Line coaches.

I had presumed concessions would not be available until at least next year, especially after the Auditor General report highlighted the risk of costs and delays for an all-singing, all-dancing concession entitlement platform linked into it.

What’s emerged today is a simpler concession implementation.

How does it work?

For concession passengers wanting Tap And Go, you’ll need to:

1. Choose your card or device, and make a Tap And Go trip
2. Go to the portal, and enter the credit card number details you used, and link this to a concession entitlement.

That’s it. The fare for that first trip will be adjusted to the concession price (automatically if you do these steps on the same day, or you can request a refund if it’s later).

After that, travel using that card or device will be charged at the concession fare.

Entitlement still has to be proven during a ticket inspection – the same as with concession Myki cards now.

Why the two step process? Because for security, the systems involved avoid using and storing the real bank account number where possible. There’s some tokenisation going on. So you need to register a transaction, then tell the Myki system that you’re eligible for a concession.

It’s also why if when travelling you swap between your cards/phone/watch, they don’t count as being from one account. The tokens are different.

I am told you can link multiple cards/devices to a concession entitlement, but you would still want to stick to one device on any one day to get the daily cap, and to avoid issues where a Tap On and a Tap Off are treated as two Tap Ons (with two default fares).

All of this is quite different from the NSW Opal system, where set up concession for Tap And Go requires setting up an online account, and entering all the details of your entitlement. You also have to choose whether to always use an Opal Card or always use a card or device. You can’t switch on different days.

So this new Vic system seems simpler to use, if a little less sophisticated overall.

It’s good for more people to have the option of Tap And Go.

I am told a lot of full fare people have switched from Myki cards to Tap And Go; around a third. I’m one of those people… because it’s easier.

So if you use a concession, and you want to use Tap And Go, you can do so from Tuesday!

Update: More info online here

Friends are currently travelling to some of the same places (yes, I’m jealous) which has reminded me to finish it: basically this is some notes for my own reference for a future trip.

Luggage

For three weeks in Europe, the old wheeled mid-sized (90-ish litre) suitcase was fine, along with a carry-on backpack (largish, 29 litre). The suitcase had to be checked in when flying, but this didn’t cause any issues for me.

Some people prefer to use a small carry-on case, but I prefer to avoid the stress of squeezing everything in. That said, I probably could have packed lighter if I’d tried.

Wheeled luggage makes everything easier.

The one thing you want to avoid is too much luggage if any of your travels will take you onto city metros. Many of the older stations have lots of steps and no lift/ramp access.

I only took one pair of shoes; some new walking shoes. That turned out to be fine; they were good for all weather.

I don’t think I used the umbrella but I did use the rain jacket once or twice. But we were lucky to only get light rain. If you need an umbrella but don’t have one, you’ll regret it.

One of my kids got me packing cubes for my birthday before the trip. They’re not really cubes, but very useful for keeping everything tidy in the case.

For a subsequent 3 night Sydney trip, I used just the 29 litre carry-on backpack, which was a squeeze, but fine.

Devices and chargers

In Europe I travelled with a laptop (USB C), an iPhone 13 (Apple Lightning), a power bank in case the phone conked out (USB C) and an electric shaver (some old style cable and charger). So I needed three separate chargers.

This prompted me after the trip to try to standardise with a new phone (USB C) and new shaver (USB A). They both were due for replacement anyway.

The shaver was advertised as USB (and without a charger, just a cable). The gotcha is the cable is a special one; you can’t use a standard USB A or C cable.

Trains

We caught trains between cities.

I booked the London to Oxford train via the Great Western Railway web site, which worked fine. Tickets were picked up from the station. Not cheap, but UK trains rarely are.

London to Paris Eurostar was booked through their web site. Easy.

For the French long distance trains, and the train from France to Spain, I ended up using The Train Line, which does mean you pay a small booking fee but the web site is very well designed. The SNCF (French railways) web site can also do this, but at the time did not seem as friendly. That said, looking again now, it’s improving steadily.

The downside of using The Train Line was it was trickier to get tickets rebooked when the train from Lyon to Arles was cancelled.

One curiosity is that French train bookings require names and Dates Of Birth, even for fairly short trips.

Hotels vs apartments

London was a hotel, with paid breakfast, near Paddington station for convenience for the trip to Oxford. A buffet breakfast was nice for the first few days. It was good – would do that again.

The other stays were in apartments, with food bought from nearby cafes or boulangeries (bakeries). Staying in central locations worked very well, making exploring easy.

For the most popular European city attractions, you definitely want to book well in advance. We missed out seeing inside Barcelona’s Sagrada Família due to our own disorganisation.

Language

A couple of months before the trip I’d started learning French using Duo Lingo. This probably made very little difference – by the time of the trip I didn’t know enough for it to really help.

Duo Lingo takes gamification to an almost ridiculous level for an app. But perhaps it works, as I’m still doing it, hoping it’ll rub in and that I’ll get to use French on a future trip.

Even if you know little French, proclaiming “Bonjour!” (good day!) as you walk in the door of a shop in France is customary, and along with appropriate “S’il vous plaît” (please) “Au revoir” (goodbye) helps show that you’re at least making an effort. All the people we encountered were eager to help, whatever their levels of English.

Same in Barcelona and surrounds. “¡Hola!”, and “Gracias” counts for a lot.

Payments and city PT

Everywhere we went took cards. For the first time, I didn’t bother to withdraw any cash at all on the entire trip.

Everywhere had Google Maps, making it easy to navigate on foot or via public transport.

London, Lyon, Arles had tap and go local public transport.

Paris had a phone app, Barcelona is halfway through implementing tap and go. Express Transit tracks the cities that do and don’t have tap and go.

Almost a year on from that trip, I’m keen to go again. Will have to start planning!

PS. Melbourne travel writer Tim Richards has a new book out: Train Europe – which is worth a look.

PPS. I don’t quite understand the fuss about Melbourne Airport moving drop-off/pick-up further from the terminals; everybody has to cover a significant distance once in the terminal anyway, so a bit more shouldn’t matter, as long as assistance such as Travellers Aid is available to the new areas. Drop-off traffic delays are pretty horrible, so it seems like a positive move… until we get the long-awaited train.

Why? It’s the car’s birthday, so the registration, insurance and the annual service all come up at the same time of year. (Okay actually it was in July; I’m a bit delayed getting some of my blog posts written.)

I took it in for its annual service and they said it’s time for the eight year or 120,000 km service. Then they looked at the odometer which was at 61,000 km. So let’s just say I’m driving well below the average kilometres.

Later in the day the bad news came through that the engine battery was just about dead and the tyres needed replacing. The final bill was almost $3000.

Insurance for me is about $900 and rego is about $800 although there was a discount this year.

Ultimately, I keep the car for convenience, because some trips I make remain impractical or inconvenient by public transport. This is mostly due to the level of service in my area, and the places I go.

And yes, I still do the annual service because I want a reasonable amount of confidence that it’ll work when I need it.

Apart from the annual costs, petrol is also expensive. I got a surprise recently when filling up cost over $100, I think for the first time ever. Luckily I only need to do this about once every two months.

Thankfully, for me, it’s financially not a problem.

But I really feel for the people under financial pressure who don’t have a viable alternative to driving, and have trouble affording running their car. This is one of many reasons why more investment is needed to make PT, walking and cycling a better option for more people and more trips.

But I think he missed the mark on this opinion piece on trams last week.

(It’s only a couple of minutes long, so you may want to watch if you haven’t already seen it, before reading on.)

He’s missed some of the history, which is vital to understanding where we are now.

Let’s go through some of what he said.

“When Melbourne was laying what is now the world’s biggest tram network 120 years ago, other cities around the world were digging subways.”

• Firstly, he seems to have used the term “subways” in the American sense; the rest of the world calls them metros. Possibly the reason for this is that he’s conflated high capacity metro/rapid transit systems with underground railways, as we’ll see below.
• Secondly, more importantly, those other cities didn’t weren’t just “digging subways” instead of building trams. Most of them did both.
• The older cities he quotes later in the piece all had extensive tram networks, but later got rid of them (in some cases only to start building new lines later): New York City 1832-1957, Paris 1855-1938, London 1860-1952.
• Most cities later got rid of their trams, and replaced them with buses. Melbourne is something of an outlier in keeping an extensive tram network, though not unique. And it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that trams would be kept – it was probably only due to timing of then-recent upgrades and the efforts of people like Robert Risson that they weren’t all replaced with buses.

“There are now 214 cities in the world with extensive underground railways.”

• The 214 seems to come from Wikipedia. Fair enough.
• But the definitions are wobbly. I’ve talked about this before: Metro vs suburban/commuter rail in particular is a grey area. As Wikipedia itself notes: The dividing line between the metro and other modes of public transport, such as light rail and commuter rail, is not always clear.
• And importantly (because Kohler’s piece later zeroes in on tunnelling costs), these are not purely (or even mostly) underground railways. 40% of NYC’s Subway runs aboveground; in London about 55% of the Underground is aboveground. Some systems on the list of 214 such as the new Honolulu “Skyline” are completely elevated.

A key lesson here is that cities usually don’t build their railways underground unless they have to. At or above ground level is cheaper, so they will do this if they can.

So in Australian cities, we ended up with railways mostly built at ground level because the cities were being established as the railways grew with them.

But in established central cities there’s usually no space for new ground level railways. That’s why New York, London, Paris all built underground railways in their city centres from the 1860s onwards. Outside city centres (particularly in London and New York) their “Subway” or “Underground” systems and other railways were mostly built aboveground.

In Australia we didn’t build underground rail until the 1920s Sydney City Circle, and in Melbourne the 1970s City Loop, and these are only small portions of much larger aboveground suburban networks.

Today, I would argue that the key difference between metro systems worldwide and Australia’s suburban rail networks isn’t the tunnels, it’s the “Turn Up And Go” service frequency. But, again, that’s the argument about definitions – whether suburban rail can be counted as metro. (And even systems that definitely are metros don’t have universally good service frequency.)

Construction costs

Kohler goes on to talk about rail tunnel construction costs, basically saying that they’ve gone up and up and up over the decades.

This is unsurprising. While technology has improved, labour costs have gone up, so too have safety regulations (more than ever it’s rightly frowned upon if lots of low paid workers digging your tunnels suffer from industrial accidents).

The requirements for all these systems have also changed a lot. London’s Underground older “tube” tunnels are famously constrained because of limitations of tunnelling back in the day. The newest Elizabeth Line is a complete contrast – it’s spacious by comparison.

Tunnelling has also got more complex because the cities they are building them in have grown, and these days there are huge numbers of underground services that need to be found and relocated before digging – plus, as Kohler notes, authorities aren’t as keen to use cheaper “cut and cover” tunnelling which is very disruptive at surface level.

Beyond that, the geological conditions also play a part in tunnelling costs, and can vary widely between cities.

He then compares “subways” to trams, saying Melbourne’s trams “don’t carry many people, average 11km per hour, and clog up the roads.”

• He’s quoted the Melbourne CBD average speed for trams. The network-wide average is 16km per hour, which definitely needs improvement, but it’s 45% higher than what he’s quoted.
• The slow speed is also a problem with Melbourne’s trams specifically, not trams in general. For instance the Gold Coast Light Rail average speed is similar to that of the Paris Metro.
• “Many people” is relative. Trams carry fewer than trains of course. But Melbourne’s 24 tram routes carry about 155 million passenger journeys per year, about 35% more than Melbourne’s hundreds of bus routes.
• The clogged roads argument is very old school thinking, the type of argument that sparked the Citizen Tram film in the 1960s.
• Put it this way: A moderately loaded tram with 100 people aboard taking up 35 metres of road, and 30 cars carrying 35 people (average car occupancy) taking up 150 metres of road, are all in a traffic jam together. So which mode is actually clogging up the road?

Kohler then decides to compare Las Vegas “Loop” tunnelling costs, and this is where the whole piece really goes off the rails.

“Musk says he can get the (tunnelling) cost down to $10 million per mile, which nobody believes. But even if he missed that by a factor of ten, it’s still a lot cheaper than the Suburban Rail Loop. So why don’t we hire them?”

• The Vegas Loop tunnels are only big enough to fit a (Tesla) car, with no space for so much as an emergency exit. So of course it’s much cheaper.
• The tunnels are so constrained you’d struggle to even get out of the car and evacuate if a problem occurred.
• And of course the total carrying capacity is tiny, even compared to trams, let alone metro/subway systems – even if they overcome the staffing costs (one driver per car, max 4 passengers).
• So it’s a completely invalid comparison. And while some of Kohler’s other reports have a healthy infusion of humour, there’s no hint of sarcasm here.

The right mode for the job

Ultimately, cities should pick the right mode for the job. Trains, buses, trams, ferries, cars, they all have their place. They fulfil different roles.

Trains and trams aren’t really comparable, other than both using rails. The capacity of a train is 5-10 times as high, and they’re generally faster, but they need more specialised (and separated) infrastructure to work well. But trams can run along streets (both a curse and a blessing) and effectively serve shorter trips, as stops can be closer together.

Cities that got rid of trams mostly replaced them with buses, which at the time were seen as the closest equivalent in capacity and speed, as well as also running on roads.

Maybe you can argue that cities with metros decided they didn’t need trams, and that helped get rid of them. But plenty of cities without metros also got rid of their trams, and some cities kept both. To argue that Melbourne’s trams are a failed choice against city metros doesn’t really stack up.

The good news is that Melbourne’s trams can be vastly improved, and some of this is already happening – the upgrade of small Z and A class trams to bigger the G class has commenced. Accessibility is lagging, and speed isn’t improving – but can be if the government pulls their finger out and takes traffic light optimisation and priority seriously.

And Melbourne may not have what Wikipedia counts as a metro, but it has a big rail system, with similar trains to world metros, similar stations to many metro systems, and far fewer level crossings than it used to have. It’s got huge potential.

To get all of the benefits of a metro, they just need to run more of the trains frequently, all day every day.

Notes

• The comments on Kohler’s YouTube video were originally open. Mostly they were not favourable to the piece. ABC News decided after a few hours to pause them, and now appears to have stopped/hidden/deleted them altogether. Comments are still open on the Instagram and Facebook posts.
• Kohler’s piece also sparked this news.com.au article, with comments from people who do know a lot about transport, Jago Dodson and Graham Currie.

Currently the Ballarat and Geelong lines merge just west of Deer Park, where they run to Sunshine, joined there by trains from Bendigo (though these don’t actually stop at Sunshine station).

From there, these three lines reach the city via the V/Line Regional Rail Link tracks from Sunshine into Southern Cross (shown in purple above).

So how full are the RRL tracks? Here’s how the timetable looks in peak hour inbound:

• GLG=from Geelong line (blue)
• BGO=from Bendigo (green)
• BAL=from Ballarat (orange)
• *Short run service from Wyndham Vale, Bacchus Marsh, Melton

So… mostly a train every three minutes, meaning the RRL tracks are pretty full in peak.

There’s also some careful skip-stop timetabling on the Ballarat line where some trains stop at Rockbank and Ardeer, and others stop at Caroline Springs and Deer Park, to help balance loads and make the most out of the track capacity.

Similarly in peak, the busy Tarneit and new West Tarneit stations are only served by short run services starting at Wyndham Vale.

Pretty full tracks is why to add capacity in the short term, the focus has been on longer/higher capacity trains, with the medium term plan (frustratingly delayed) being Melton electrification: a combination of higher capacity trains, running on the suburban tracks instead, and track expansion between Sunshine and at least Deer Park west.

Other options might include upgraded signalling (though this would likely mean also upgrading the entire V/Line train fleet) – but ultimately, Melton (and Tarneit/Wyndham Vale) are part of suburban Melbourne, and really need a suburban train service.

The sooner it happens, the better.