If you travel long distances, Melbourne’s flat rate fare system works very much in your favour.

Regardless of whether you travel 800 metres or 40 kilometres, myki will charge you the same amount for a 2 hour zone 1 and 2 fare ($4.30 as of 2018).

I have taken advantage of this before to travel very cheaply to towns beyond Melbourne’s city boundaries such as Wandong and Warburton.

So what is the furthest that you can travel for only $4:30?

Criteria

Before working this out, we need a couple of ground rules:

1. Distance measured is ‘as the crow flies’ and not the actual distance taken on a vehicle. This is to avoid spending all day going around in circles on the Manningham Mover or something similar.
2. The trip must be on a myki-ticketed public transport vehicle entirely within zones 1 and 2.
3. The distance must be measured from the public transport stop/station and not the geographical centre of the place.

Results

I tried a lot of combinations before finding what I believe to be the furthest distance possible.

It seems that the answer is travelling from Wandong to Flinders – this comes to a total distance of 124.36 kilometres.

This would be a rather convoluted trip. You would need to take a V/Line train from Wandong to Southern Cross Station, a metropolitan train from there to Frankston and finally change to one of the 782 buses that services the weekday off-peak extension to Flinders.

The next top five results that I tested in descending order of distance from furthest to shortest are:

1. Lara to East Warburton – 122.75 kilometres
2. Bacchus Marsh to East Warburton – 116.64 kilometres
3. Wandong to Stony Point – 114.53 kilometres
4. Lara to Healesville – 107.40 kilometres
5. Bacchus Marsh to Stony Point – 102.75 kilometres

So if you’re up for the best bang for your buck, the trip of 124.36 kilometres comes to a total cost of $0.03 per kilometre travelled – try beating that in a car!

If anybody can find a further trip with the criteria set out above, please let me know below in the comments.