Some time not too long ago in our Australian history, a dog ticket was a ½ price fare for your dog. Also in those times, many dogs were not vaccinated or de-sexed and most had fleas in the warmer weather.Yet now, a dog ticket is what the uniformed men in grey with boots and mace give you when pooch is resting on the floor under your feet – taking up no extra space, and it’s $100.
These transit police were the nicest uniformed men I’ve met in a long time. They didn’t want to give me ticket; they wanted to give me warning. I received the ticket joyfully and was just about to tell them about Barking Mad but their station had arrived and they had to leave. 'Don’t go', I said, after they had both declared themselves dog lovers. 'But we have too, sorry'. They took the Barking Mad card with them and thanked me.
I received a ticket for doing what every Australian should be able to do –travel in an environmentally friendly way using PUBLIC transport, with their quiet, clean and well-behaved pet. Off to court we go. Read about our pets on public transport policy and lobbying here.
5 comments:
It's so ridiculous when you consider that dogs travel free or for nominal charges on every form of surface transport in Europe.
London Underground
The Governments own State Plan (www.stateplan.nsw.gov.au) sets out 34 key priority actions for the next 10 years. And that includes E3: "cleaner air and progress on greenhouse gas reductions". Yet the Ministry of Transport/RailCorp would prefer responsible pet owners to drive from the Central Coast to Sydney - with all the associated air pollution and greenhouse emissions. Isn't this a little contrary to their own stated priorities? Which is interesting as another priority is S8: "increased satisfaction with Government services".
I'm certainly not satisfied with this result - how can we help?
Maybe you should highlight that your woofie probably is better behaved than the average passenger...
Beautiful dog by the way.
Shona, Sydney
I sent in a request for a bus transit pass to travel with Bondi. A week later I got an email from Ben Johnson, General Manager
Ministerial Correspondence and Customer Relations for StateRail.
He gave the usual list of ridiculous limitations on pet travel, to which I gave my comparison to other services. Whenever I have correspondence with any of these transport issues, their response always seems to ignore that I'm asking for change, because they just use a circular argument that they have to do it because their regulations say so.
I also pointed out that I'd actually applied for a BUS pass.
On a related note, I was listening to a rebroadcast of Phil Adams' LNL where he was talking to an official of some city where they were making great strides in solving public transport issues. He had a great quote about transport not being a means in itself, but a way to serve society. I'll have another look through my LNL podcasts to see if I can identify it.
Ok. The speaker was Enrique Penalosa, former mayor of Bogota.
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