A few days ago I returned from a week long trip to Sydney, where I spent every day getting around by train, bus and ferry.
Because their fare system is based around single and return tickets on trains, the cheapest way get around Sydney is to buy a weekly MyMulti ticket – they are valid across almost all modes of public transport within the zones you purchase.
While only needing to buy one ticket for a entire week avoids the long queues at the booking offices or ticket machines, after switching to Myki at the start of this year, I’ve already forgotten how to make a magstripe ticket last all week – this is what it looked like by the end of my trip:
The minor damage did faze the ticket barriers: on two separate occasions they told me ‘not valid’ and forced me to retry. For comparison, it has taken me a few months to suffer the same number of Myki read failures.
After years of no fails, the last few months I am getting about one fail a week on average, with brand new tickets right out of the vending machine. I am wondering if they have switched to a poor quality ticket supplier, with defective magnetism.
Dodgy tickets is one likely explanation. Something similar happened down in Melbourne with the Metcard system, when a particular type of ticket was trialled, which gummed up all of the machines:
http://www.robx1.net/victkt/metcard/html/manuf.htm
With Metcard regular cleaning of the ticket validators was a key part of keeping the system working: