Fare evader plan wins start-up award

Tramsurance, a proposed insurance service for public transport fare evaders in Melbourne, won the Most Innovative and Disruptive award at a recent event for start-up business ideas.

The idea championed by 19-year-old university student Tom Pisel, which would cover the penalties of contributors who paid a premium of $20 a month, developed into its current form at last month’s Startup Weekend Melbourne, an event at which people work on web or mobile applications that could be developed into businesses.

“I had had the idea for a while, but developed it into something that could work there,” Pisel told BRW.

Tramsurance was not the overall winner of Startup Weekend Melbourne but one of five category winners.

Entrepreneur and learnable.com co-founder Leni Mayo, one of the Startup Weekend judges, said Tramsurance was an interesting and fun idea but that there was a strong chance of it being illegal if put into practice and a strong chance that it would be made illegal if it were not already. Not everybody took part in the event to put their idea into practice, Mayo said.

“I think some people go into Startup Weekend looking to make an idea work,” he said. “Some go in as learning exercise. To the people involved in Tramsurance this would be a fantastic learning experience.”

Second-year engineering student Pisel said he and colleagues were yet to decide whether to try to put Tramsurance, which has drawn the ire of Public Transport Victoria and outraged supporters of Melbourne’s public transport services, into practice.

“We want to continue but we do not want to put ourselves at legal risk,” Pisel says.

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