Milestone for Opal smart cards in Sydney

Public transport passengers in Sydney, Australia, have enthusiastically welcomed the city’s new Opal smart card, being progressively rolled out across ferries, trains, buses and light rail in the greater Sydney area, with 10,000 already issued since trials began in December 2012. By 2015 the Opal system, being installed by the Cubic-led Pearl Consortium for Transport New South Wales, will cover 42 ferry wharves, more than 300 train stations and more than 5,000 buses and light rail systems.
August 1, 2013 Read time: 2 mins
Public transport passengers in Sydney, Australia, have enthusiastically welcomed the city’s new Opal smart card, being progressively rolled out across ferries, trains, buses and light rail in the greater Sydney area, with 10,000 already issued since trials began in December 2012.

By 2015 the Opal system, being installed by the 378 Cubic-led Pearl Consortium for Transport New South Wales, will cover 42 ferry wharves, more than 300 train stations and more than 5,000 buses and light rail systems.

Figures just released by the New South Wales transport minister, Gladys Berejiklian, show that commuters have made more than 100,000 trips using the new adult Opal card to date. The Opal website, which was launched at the beginning of June this year, has already recorded approximately 100,000 visits.  Minister Berejiklian said 90 percent of customers were registering for a card online instead of by phone, and more than 70 percent were opting for the auto top-up function.

Cubic Transportation Systems’ managing director for Australasia, Tom Walker, said it is gratifying to see how enthusiastically Sydneysiders have adopted the new Opal card.  “We are delighted with the uptake of the Opal card and the benefits it is already providing to Sydney commuters,” said Walker.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • ITS boosts safety on Brazil’s Regis Bittencourt Highway
    October 5, 2016
    Brazil’s incident-prone Regis Bittencourt Highway was once known as ‘the highway of death’ but investment in ITS systems has brought about some big improvements, as Mauro Nogarin discovers Between 2010 and the end of 2014, Brazil made major investments in traffic technology across its national highways with the result that the ITS network went from 4,963km of fibre optics to 8,524km and the number of cameras increased from 1,127 to 3,208.
    Read More
  • Considering accessibility costs little and pays dividends for all travellers
    August 8, 2017
    Catering for those with disabilities can be cost-effective and improve services for all travellers, as David Crawford discovers. Clearer understanding of the economic value of accessible transport is essential if we are to speed up the current slow deployment levels, according to the Paris-based International Transport Forum (ITF), which staged a 2016 round table on the ‘Benefits and Costs of Inclusion in Transport’. It wants to see greater availability of data on levels of actual and unmet demand for acces
    Read More
  • Beacon for transport innovation
    August 22, 2016
    Transport for New South Wales, Australia is looking to expand on its current trial of Bluetooth beacons at Chatswood Station and bus interchange in Sydney and calling for submissions around new ways to put Bluetooth technology to use to make catching public transport easier. The Beacon Challenge follows the current trial, which uses more than 70 beacons to help customers with vision impairment to navigate between trains, buses and places of interest in and adjacent to the interchange by sending location
    Read More
  • Robust enforcement strategy needed for free flow toll roads
    January 10, 2012
    Timidity has no place in effective enforcement operations on free-flow toll roads, says the NRA's Cathal Masteron. What's needed is a robust strategy which starts big and reduces in size over time, rather than starts small and gains a reputation for being easy to avoid
    Read More

Highlighted Content