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When Laura Billings recently took her two children on a school holiday day trip into Melbourne from her home in the town of Ocean Grove, she decided they would take advantage of the Victorian government’s recent free public transport initiative, and catch the train.

“Normally we wouldn’t do that as it’s a bit more clunky,” Billings says. It adds at least another 30 minutes on to what is already an hour and a half of travelling, including an inescapable 30 minute drive to the nearest train station, Waurn Ponds. “But we thought, ‘it’s free’.”

Billings is a campaigner for Parents for Climate, and accustomed to the debate about sustainable transport, but she was surprised at just how many people appeared to be embracing the free ride.

“We got to Waurn Ponds and we could not find a car park because it was overflowing. So many people have jumped on that it’s hard to get a seat on the trains, or to get car parks to use it,” she says.

The Victorian government made public transport free for the month of April as a temporary cost-of-living measure after the cost of fuel skyrocketed in March thanks to the US-Israel war on Iran. But it’s difficult to determine just how much that initiative has changed Victorians’ travel behaviour, and whether any changes will stick.

The first week of the scheme saw reports of a huge influx of public transport users, particularly on regional trains. It also resulted in serious overcrowding.

But Victorian government data shows a lacklustre bump: 21m public transport trips were taken in the first two weeks of the scheme, a 10% increase on the previous fortnight but roughly in line with the same period last year. A Victorian government spokesperson noted that the free transport offering had coincided with the Easter long weekend and beginning of school holidays.

Traffic data analysis by Guardian Australia shows that major road use in Melbourne before the introduction of free public transport followed consistent weekly patterns, before dropping sharply in the first week of April. It has since largely recovered, albeit to levels slightly lower than previously, which may be explained by the school holiday period or other variables such as roadworks. Robust data analysis is unlikely to be possible at least until the free transport initiative ends. (Guardian Australia requested public transport usage data from Transport Victoria but it was not received by deadline.)

In any case, data comparisons don’t tell the whole story, says Milad Haghani, an associate professor at the University of Melbourne. A week into the free public transport scheme in Victoria, Haghani and his team launched a rapid-fire survey of nearly 2,000 Australians in Victoria, New South Wales – where public transport fares remain unchanged – and Queensland, which introduced 50c fares in 2024.

“There have been experiences of free public transport around the world … [but] there’s not been an occasion where public transport has been made free during a period of a spike in fuel price,” Haghani says. The circumstances created “a perfect experimental test bed” to find out which changes in price most affected the behaviour of the public.

Car use declined in all states to much the same extent, the researchers found: 42.1% of respondents in NSW, 39.3% in Queensland, and 43.2% in Victoria reported reducing their car use. In Victoria, 26.3% reported shifting some commuting trips from car to public transport, compared with 23.7% in NSW and 21.1% in Queensland.

“The difference is relatively marginal, given the fact that the difference in [public transport] pricing was quite substantial,” says Haghani. “That suggests there is far more to people’s decision-making than the price of public transport: whether people have access to it, whether people can make a trip reasonably from their origin to the destination that they used to make via car.”

Also important was whether the travel was for work or pleasure. “People seemed more flexible in reducing car use for commutes than for leisure trips,” says Haghani.

Further analysis revealed that a key factor for people choosing to switch to public transport was whether or not they were already using it. If you were only ever just driving, “you stick to your guns,” says Haghani.

There are signs that public transport is just one of the ways Victorians are trying to share the fuel load. A spokesperson for Australia’s largest car-share company GoGet says the company had its highest ever sign-up numbers both in Victoria and nationwide in March, and that the first quarter of this year saw “a double-digit” increase in usage on the same time last year.

Fuel is factored into the price of share-car hire, a key selling point for car-share companies, though recent fuel card thefts from share cars have forced companies to re-evaluate the logistics of that process.

Others are exploring electric or hybrid vehicles, though the lack of EV infrastructure is a challenge. Preston resident Graham Moore says his family was planning a driving holiday to Broken Hill via South Australia in an EV, but changed their plans after maps revealed a scarcity of reliable charging stations on their intended route.

Billings says there has been “almost a panic rush to EV dealers” in her community. Public transport on the Bellarine Peninsula is scarce and “quite isolating and limiting”, she says, but it hasn’t been the focus of conversations so much as the broader issues of cost of living and sustainability.

“I think the instability around just realising how fragile the system is and how at mercy we are to overseas supply has really made people re-evaluate. What would we do if there isn’t a boat coming with more petrol? I think it’s shocked a few people into thinking a bit bigger-picture about what it means and that longer-term security.”

• Additional reporting by Josh Nicholas.