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The State Government's beleaguered Opal card program is again making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
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Reports from Sydney last week said an amnesty period for students travelling on public transport to school without Opal cards had been extended for a second time, leading to accusations from bus drivers that the change from paper tickets to the electronic system had been “chaotic”.
Bus drivers say technical problems with Opal readers and the difficulty switching students to electronic cards is putting extra pressure on them to push the limits of safe driving to make up time when delayed.
The moratorium for students travelling without School Opal Cards was due to end last Monday but has been extended until March 21.
The original deadline for the amnesty period was the end of February.
The Mercury has recently revealed problems at a local level with parents taking to social media to criticise the school transport passes.
Parents who contacted the Mercury had a range of issues with the new product.
Some said their children had been denied a card because they fell just short of the boundaries, others complaining they had not received passes that were applied for in December.
The School Opal Card replaced paper tickets at the start of this year, entitling students to free travel on school days between home and school on trains, buses and ferries.
They need a separate concession card for weekend travel.
More than six weeks into the school year, several hundred School Opal Cards have yet to be distributed to students. So far, about 343,000 students have been issued cards.
The vast majority have been distributed through schools but more than 70,000 have been handed out after families – whose circumstances such as home address changed – applied for them online, according to Transport for NSW.
Bus drivers say Opal card readers are regularly malfunctioning.
The transport department said it had extended the amnesty to ensure late applications from students and schools could be processed.
But the Transport Workers Union, which represents thousands of bus drivers, said the switch to the electronic ticketing system had been poorly managed and the government needed to focus more on educating students about Opal cards.