More passengers. Same buses. Now what?

The fuel crisis triggered by conflict in the Middle East has done something years of policy debate hasn't managed: it ran a live, nationwide experiment in mode shift. And this, combined with different fare pricing approaches across Australia, drove results that are more nuanced than the headlines suggest.

One crisis, three responses

Faced with the same fuel shock, Australian states took different paths. Victoria made public transport free for April and May, with half-price fares to follow for the rest of the year. Tasmania went further, extending free travel through to July.

However, New South Wales, South Australia, Queensland, and Western Australia held their fares steady – on the hunch that cutting fares wasn't the right lever for a crisis that would last longer than a month. It’s worth noting that Queensland had likely already exhausted the potential of mode shift, having held public transport fares across bus, rail, ferry, and tram at a flat 50c since August 2024.

These divergent approaches illuminate the impact of price on mode shift.

In Victoria, Jeroen Weimar, Secretary of the Department of Transport and Planning, told the PTAANZ Public Transport Policy Symposium that the state had seen a 25–35% uptick in demand across trains, trams and buses. The network had carried 1.64 million more passengers in a single week than the same week the year before – one extra passenger for every four carried previously. Finally, the state has reached pre-Covid ridership levels for the first time since 2020.

"With people spending $200, $250 to fill up the tanks [of their cars], we can't waste this crisis." — Jeroen Weimar, Secretary, Victorian Department of Transport and Planning

But there were no additional services allocated, and the network also appeared to hit its ceiling. Easter exposed it: passengers standing for hours on regional train lines and overcrowding at stations.

In New South Wales, Transport Minister John Graham took a different position. He kept fares unchanged, arguing the government needed to keep its options open for a crisis that would last more than a month. The network grew too – official Transport for New South Wales (TfNSW) data shows 3.68 million more public transport trips in March 2026 compared to March 2025, a 6.1% increase across all modes. Unfortunately, like Victoria, passengers reported overcrowding.

New Zealand, which made no specific fare changes in response to the fuel crisis, provides a useful cross-check. Auckland recorded 2.25 million bus, train and ferry trips in one week in mid-March – a seven-year high, with 140,000 more journeys than the same week the prior year. Wellington saw 3% growth, Christchurch 2.2%, Dunedin 4%. The fuel shock alone, without any fare subsidy, drove real and measurable mode shift.

What network performance data tells us

At Mosaiq by Snapper Services, we track historical performance data across bus networks – collecting more than 12 billion bus 'heartbeats' or GPS pings monthly. Our data for TfNSW, Victoria, and South East Queensland (SEQ) from December 2025 to April 2026 adds a layer that patronage headlines don't capture: what happened to service quality as demand grew.

The picture is consistent with networks absorbing pressure. In March 2026, TfNSW recorded 12,244 bus service cancellations – a 10.4% increase on the same month the prior year. Yet within the services tracked by Mosaiq, on-time performance held essentially flat: punctuality improved marginally (+1.2 percentage points year-on-year) and reliability was unchanged, suggesting the network absorbed the demand surge without significant service degradation. And notably, when the fuel excise cut took effect on 1 April and demand eased, cancellations fell immediately – down 17.1% compared to the same month the prior year.

The mode split is also telling. Bus trips in NSW grew 4.3% year-on-year in March, but that's below the 6.1% all-modes growth. The uplift skewed towards rail and Metro.

For Queensland, the context matters. As of February 2025, SEQ had already achieved 18.3% patronage growth compared to the same period in 2023, attributed to the 50c fare policy. Research from the University of Melbourne published in April 2026 found that during the fuel crisis, 21% of Queensland commuters shifted some trips from car to public transport – compared to 24% in NSW (fares unchanged) and 26% in Victoria (fares free).

That modest 2–5% gap is the clearest data we have for what price elasticity exhaustion looks like: Queensland had already captured most of its fare-sensitive switchers before the crisis arrived. Pain at the petrol pump drove more people to take public transport in Queensland, although fares remained unchanged. And a slightly larger proportion moved to public transport in Victoria when fares became free.

But price reduction is not the main factor driving mode shift. According to the University of Melbourne’s study, it appears that access, travel time, and reliability are crucial: with only ~49% of survey respondents in these states saying they had good access to public transport, and ~70% saying their trip will be slower with public transport.

The question authorities need to ask now

Weimar framed the challenge at PTAANZ:

“How do we ensure the majority of those passengers who are traveling with us for free stay on the journey when those fares go up to half price?”

The experience these passengers have onboard will be fundamental to keeping their loyalty - with networks needing to have enough capacity (or ‘slack’) to take a surge in passengers without overcrowding or service cancellation. While price may drive a surge in patronage, it’s not the only factor important to our riders - evidenced by the only modest changes in patronage between states that offered free fares vs held their fares steady.

Victoria's Easter crisis wasn't caused by free fares. It was caused by a network running close to its limits before the surge, with no quick way to expand physical capacity in response to a sudden demand event. The free fares revealed the gap, they didn't create it.

Public transport networks like those in Victoria and NSW are typically designed around predictable peak demand, claims Hussein Dia, Professor of Transport Technology and Sustainability at Swinburne University of Technology – which means they perform well under normal conditions. But that also means that they don’t tend to have additional capacity during these peak periods, and events like the fuel crisis can quickly cause overcrowding.

The same diagnostic applies everywhere. The fuel crisis has shown which networks had slack and which didn't. This is precisely where performance intelligence earns its value. Understanding where a network is approaching its limits – at route level, at stop level, at time of day – is what allows operators to redeploy capacity before the system fails, rather than after. The data exists. The question is whether operators are using it to act ahead of the next pressure event, or waiting to respond to it.

“[Whether public transport users stay on beyond the fuel crisis] will come back to our fundamentals – reliability, frequency, customer service, good support and staff, and giving people a sense of how the systems work for them. But it’s also about network improvement.”  – Jeroen Weimar, Secretary of the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning

What we're watching next

Victoria's free travel period ends 31 May. Half-price fares follow. The next 90 days will show whether patronage gains hold as prices rise, or whether the surge was largely driven by leisure and discretionary travel that returns to cars when cost is reintroduced.

For NSW, the signal to watch is whether April's 17.1% drop in cancellations was driven primarily by the excise cut reducing demand pressure. If cancellations rise as the excise cut phases out and demand returns, that points to a capacity problem that fare policy can't solve.

For Queensland, the immediate pressure is lower – but SEQ has already achieved 18.3% patronage growth in 2025 compared to the same period in 2023, attributed to the 50c fare policy, and the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland (RACQ) has flagged the need for improved public transport to solve congestion ahead of the 2032 Olympics. The fuel crisis adds a new demand variable on top of a network already under structural pressure.

For New Zealand, Auckland recorded a seven-year patronage high in mid-March – without any fare changes. The fuel shock alone was enough to shift behaviour. That's a useful reminder that price isn't the only lever, and that networks which have invested in service quality and capacity are better placed to capture demand when the conditions change.

Ultimately, the question is whether Australian transport authorities can use these findings to support their budget submissions for state funding. State budgets have already been announced for Victoria and Western Australia, with budgets for NSW, Queensland and South Australia due in June. This documented surge in demand, if it continues, will require extra capacity that should be addressed by these budget decisions.

The networks that come out of this period in the best position won't necessarily be the ones that went free. They'll be the ones that used the surge to understand their own constraints, and moved to address them via funding and service expansion.

Mosaiq by Snapper Services tracks the performance of public transport networks in more than 30 countries. If you'd like to understand what your network's data is telling you about performance under load, we can help.

Note: TfNSW patronage data excludes untracked Opal tap-ons and tap-offs. Victoria and SEQ official patronage data for February–April 2026 is not yet published.