The Bill’s Here. The Upgrade Isn’t.
Melbourne commuters are paying 2026 prices for a network that won't be fixed until late this year. As fares rise and trains continue to run late, the promised rebuild is testing public patience and exposing a gap between what commuters pay and what they receive.
Madeleine Faure and Lauren Williamson | TheBurne.com.au | April 2026
Audrey Tange has learned to add twenty minutes to every journey before she leaves her house. It is 7:45 am on a cold Tuesday morning. She is standing at her stop on the 48 tram line, refreshing the PTV app and watching her screen insist the tram is 2 minutes away. There is no tram in sight. By the time it arrives, it will be too late. By the time she reaches her CBD office, she will have lost an hour of her morning to a service that became more expensive in January and is no more reliable.
For Tange, and for the hundreds of thousands of Melbournians who do not own a car and have no backup for when the network fails, this is not an occasional inconvenience. It is the shape of every working day.
Melbourne's public transport network is in the middle of a government-funded rebuild, one that commuters are already paying for, but cannot yet see. The state government has committed $77.5 million to fund thousands of additional train services across the network, reducing wait times on lines including Lilydale, Glen Waverley and Alamein. The Metro tunnel is open, but driver shortages and training pipelines have pushed every substantive improvement to late 2026, at best. According to Public Transport User Association spokesperson Daniel Bowen, if Melbourne’s fares had simply tracked inflation since 2010, commuters would be paying a $9.30 cap today. Instead, they are paying $11.40, the highest short-trip fare of any city in the country. Since January 2026, every full-fare Myki user in Melbourne has been paying an extra 40 cents a day compared to last year.
For Tange, 23, the maths is unforgiving. On a full-fare Myki, she pays the daily cap every weekday, costing her approximately $55 a week and well over $2,700 a year just to get from her flat in Kew to her workspace in the city. When the 2026 increase landed, what shocked her was not the figure. It was the timing