The five most affordable systems all have flat fare structures, with minimum wage earners in Beijing only needing to work seven minutes to afford the fare for an average journey in the city. London's tube system was the most expensive network, as shown in the chart below. Its fare for the average trip required almost 54 minutes' work on the minimum wage. Melbourne ranked 10th, requiring just over 24 minutes of work on minimum wage to cover the average fare. Sydney buses ranked 7th (23 minutes) and Sydney trains came 13th (27 minutes).

The average distance travelled by public transport in each city is closely linked to population density and city design. "Greater density may mean, for example, that a customer does not need to travel as far to access the economic and social opportunities that the travel offers," according to the report. In London, for example, the average bus or train journey is less than two kilometres. By contrast, the average train trip in Sydney was 17.1 kilometres – more than eight times longer – and the average Sydney bus trip was 6.7 kilometres in 2011-12. As seen in the chart above, Australian cities made up four of the five most affordable public transport networks when ranked by the time a minimum wage earner would need to work to travel one kilometre of the longest possible journey.

Sydney trains ranked 2nd behind Beijing rail, with minimum wage earners needing to work for just under 11 seconds to cover the cost of travelling one kilometre on this ticket. Beijing workers needed just over 10 seconds to cover the cost of travelling the same distance. Melbourne ranked 3rd (11.8 seconds) while Sydney Buses ranked worst of the Australian cities, coming 19th (50.3 seconds). Australian public transport networks cover far larger distances than many European and American networks, the report found. Brisbane and Sydney trains offered the longest trips – more than 250 kilometres – compared with 67 kilometres on the London Underground, 40 kilometres on the New York subway or 32 kilometres on the Paris metro or bus network. When it comes to short trips, shown above, Beijing Bus and Rail were the most affordable, with minimum wage earners needing to work only seven minutes to afford the cheapest fare.

By contrast, London's minimum wage earners need to work more more than 42 minutes to afford the cheapest fare. Melbourne offers the worst value for money out of Australia's capital cities by this measure, while Sydney buses offers the best. "With the short trip ranking, those cities with flat fares – New York, Chicago, Portland, Vancouver, Toronto – all come out the worst," said NineSquared director, Robin Barlow. "Flat fare cities … penalise people to take short trips, effectively. But if you take long trips, it's fantastic."

Value for money? The report set out to investigate whether Australia really did have the most expensive fares in the world, as often claimed in media and other reports. "Fares across the country are not particularly high by international standards," Mr Barlow said. "We may have expensive public transport, but we also have pretty high wage rates so the two need to balance out against each other." However, he noted that the report looked only at ticket prices without considering the quality of each transport network offered.

"There's tension between providing a high-frequency, quality service …. and the fare you pay. We've only looked at one side of it," Mr Barlow said. It's a critical omission, according to transport experts. "To say you're getting value for money in an Australian city is questionable," said University of Melbourne senior lecturer in transport planning, John Stone. "[The report] says that's not what it's looking at, but then I think it's missed the main point."

Public transport in cities such as Vienna, Berlin and Munich offered residents an alternative to owning a car, he said. "Whereas what we're marketing in Australian cities is something that might get you to work if you happen to be lucky enough to live and work along the rail line. It doesn't give you 24-hour-a-day access." He said the widely cited argument that Australian cities lack the population density to support a competitive public transport system was "an excuse". "You only have to go to Vancouver or Toronto to show that's not the case. In global cities with comparable density in the suburbs, public transport does compete because they concentrate on making sure people can make connections between suburban services and fast radial services."

One of the biggest problems in Sydney was a fare structure that "penalised people financially" for transferring between buses and trains, Dr Stone said. And both Melbourne and Sydney needed to simplify their bus routes to encourage fast, effective transfers. "Suburban bus routes in both cities were developed by private companies aiming to link as many possible destinations within their own service, to maximise their own ridership at the expense of competing operators," Dr Stone said. The result was a slow, complicated system that duplicates much of the rail network. "We've got a lot of buses travelling a lot of kilometres with very few people on board … That sort of inefficiency means it's never going to be possible to put in the frequencies needed to attract people to public transport."