When Laura Billings recently took her two children on a school holiday day trip into Melbourne from her home in the town of Ocean Grove, she decided they would take advantage of the Victorian government’s recent free public transport initiative and catch the train.
“Normally we wouldn’t do that as it’s a bit more clunky,” Billings says. It adds at least another 30 minutes on to what is already an hour and a half of travelling, including an inescapable 30-minute drive to the nearest train station, Waurn Ponds. “But we thought, ‘it’s free’.”
