Sydney to buy Brisbane's bus ticketing system

[ozbob]

This article exposes much of the claims as to the demise of the 10 trippers being due to the system being obsolete.  Hello, it is being sold to Sydney!   

From Brisbanetimes click here


Sydney to buy Brisbane's bus ticketing system

Sydney to buy Brisbane's bus ticketing system
Georgina Robinson and Linton Besser | February 19, 2008 - 9:00AM

The State Government has confirmed it will sell the relics of Brisbane's obsolete ticketing system to the New South Wales Government after Sydney's eight-year dream of a transport 'smartcard' ended in tatters.

As Brisbane moves on to the long-awaited 'go card' system, Translink today confirmed it was in the final stages of negotiations with the NSW Government to buy 300 15-year-old magnetic stripe machines to bolster Sydney's ageing transport system.

"These consoles are surplus to Queensland's requirements," Transport Minister John Mickel said in a statement.

"They have been sitting in a warehouse. The New South Wales government's offer means that Queensland can now financially benefit from the sale.

"The final quantity and price is still being determined," Mr Mickel said.

The purchase - a month after the NSW Transport Minister, John Watkins, terminated the Government's contract with 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 in Sydney are using obsolete ticket machines which need to be replaced.

And NSW rail commuters continue to face long queues at train stations partly because 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 down. ERG remains in a trading halt with shares at 4.5 cents.

But now the NSW 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."

NSW State Transit may need to contract ERG staff to integrate the 300 Brisbane machines so that they fit Sydney's buses.

Taxpayers could be forced to subsidise private buses if old ticketing machines fail to properly record fares.

A NSW Transport spokeswoman, Chrissy Flanagan, said the bus operators' contracts with the ministry would allow them to claim losses from revenue leakage.

She said this was "because ERG failed to deliver the new ticketing system in the contracted timeframe," but some of the project 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."