Monday morning and driving to the train station, they had a piece on the news saying that to encourage the use of public transport, that they should allow people to package their transport costs into their salary and hence gain the benefits of the same tax concessions that people with car leases get. I have a car lease and the savings over a year are amazing, but I don’t use my car to drive to work. Instead I use this train as my mode of transport.
Now what makes this story appropriate is that this morning I had to renew my monthly rail ticket. Now don’t get me wrong, the train is more economical than driving to the city, but it’s a bit rude to be forking out $172 at 7am on a Monday morning! Sort of gets the week off to bad start doesn’t it…
$172 a month and I think that is comparatively cheap. I say comparatively because when compared to driving with petrol around $1.16 a litre plus tolls plus parking plus the mystical “wear and tear” the train is by far the cheaper option – even when my car is packaged into my pre-tax salary. But the train is still not “cheap”. It is a very expensive cost for something that NEVER runs on time as I am always anywhere between 10-15mins late each way every day. The train on the way home is invariably full of garbage because they were late getting to Central and hence can’t afford the time for the cleaning. And they are generally drafty and on wet days full of water.
The radio told me that the minister concerned was lobbying his counterpart to allow public transport costs to be packaged up into salaries, but I bet they wont because think of all the GST they will miss out on!
/rant off.
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