The Dumb Card: Relic Bus Ticket System For Sydney
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday February 19, 2008
IT HAS come to this: the State Government will buy the relics of Brisbane's obsolete ticketing system after ending an eight-year dream of a transport smart card.
As Brisbane joins Perth and moves to its own Tcard, Translink, Brisbane's transport authority, has confirmed the NSW Government is trying to obtain 300 of Brisbane's 15-year-old magnetic stripe machines to bolster Sydney's ageing system. The purchase - a month after the Transport Minister, John Watkins, terminated the Government's contract with the Tcard developer, ERG Limited - shows the Government is trying to patch together a ticketing system that is in tatters. Thousands of public and private buses are using obsolete ticket machineswhich are in need of replacement. And rail commuters continue to face long queues at CityRail stations partly because its ticket machines often break down. In the month to last Wednesday, there were 691 recorded breakdowns of the 460 ticket machines across the network. CityRail says it is trying to reduce ticket queues, including using roving ticket sellers, but an overhaul of magnetic stripe ticketing systems has been put off for almost a decade in the hope the Tcard would make it redundant. The decision to axe ERG sent its share price into a spiral. ERG remains in a trading halt with shares hovering at 4.5 cents. But now the State Government has to renegotiate with the Perth company an expired maintenance contract for about 4000 ageing bus ticket machines, which use ERG technology from 1993. ERG's director of operations, Steve Gallagher, said they had a steadily worsening failure rate. "[That] ticketing equipment is well past its design life," he said. "It is two generations old." State Transit may need to contract ERG staff to integrate the 300 Brisbane machines so that they fit Sydney's buses. Taxpayers could meanwhile be forced to subsidise private buses if old ticketing machines fail to properly capture fares. A Ministry of Transport spokeswoman, Chrissy Flanagan, said the bus operators' contracts with the ministry would allow them to claim losses from revenue leakage. She added that this was because ERG failed to deliver the new ticketing system on time, but ashare of the delays were the Government's fault. The Bus and Coach Association estimates that a third of the 2500 private buses that service Sydney use ticket machines that are obsolete and that have been cannibalised to keep them going. Half the fleet report difficulties servicing ageing but not yet obsolete equipment, and the association says the entire industry will need a replacement system within 18 months. Its executive director, Darryl Mellish, said the industry needed "urgent action from the Government to enable an interim solution to be arrived at in months and not years"."Private operators have been anxiously awaiting a new ticketing system to be able to offer multiple ride discounts and cashless buses to their passengers," he said. "Now it is again up in the air."The acting chief executive of State Transit, Peter Rowley, said services were running as normal as the Tcard readers and consoles were removed and replaced with the older magnetic stripe machines."State Transit's ticket validation system consistently performs at higher than 99 per cent availability," he said."However, there are 15,000 scheduled services a day carrying 600,000 passengers, and with these kind of numbers, the odd machine fault is to be expected."Russell Mahoney, a spokesman for Mr Watkins, said the immediate issues of ageing equipment and the school Tcard were among matters being addressed by an "expert panel"."The Government has convened an expert panel to determine the short-, medium- and long-term future of electronic ticketing in Sydney," Mr Mahoney said."They'll look at what can be taken from the existing project, and how the Government can move forward in choosing a new integrated ticketing system for Sydney."Yesterday's article "The dumb card: relic bus ticket system for Sydney" quoted a Ministry of Transport spokeswoman as saying the company ERG had failed to deliver a new ticketing system on time. The remainder of the sentence, which said "some of the delay was the Government's fault", was an observation by the journalist.
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald
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