The Private Bus Industry supports the introduction of Smartcard technology for the payment of fares to increase convenience, reduce cash on buses and speed up operations.
Many other cities around the world are seeing the benefits of Smartcard technology for fare paying passengers.
BCA has been promoting the need for Sydney to have an effective Smartcard technology for many years, however feels the project is off the rails.
At the 2006 Bus Industry Confederation conference held in Canberra, Smartcard speakers from other Australian States / Cities profiled their products, progress and implementation plans. The NSW operators in the audience were embarrassed by these comparisons with the costs and time delays of the Sydney Tcard project compared to other Australian cities.
NSW BCA and Operators have been working with the Public Transport Ticketing Corporation in an effort to progress Tcard implementation. This has been a frustrating and largely nonproductive involvement with issues still unresolved after two years.
This article is prepared as an attempt to bring forward debate and changes to the existing Governments Smartcard project.
The Government's Tcard project is well behind schedule and community groups are calling for it to be scrapped. The history of the development of the Tcard is tied up with the previous approach to bus reform taken by earlier Ministers in consultation with the Unsworth Review. The Director General and Minister at the time introduced new legislation to give the Government unprecedented powers to reform the industry, and used the argument that operators were being paid for students they were not carrying whilst not acknowledging operators were obliged to provide 92% capacity for all bus passes on issue. The fallacy of this logic has been proven with new contracts dramatically increasing payments to operators. The previous method for paying operators carrying school children was in fact designed to best match the needs of the student, the parents and operators.
The Government's perceived concern about phantom riders has led the Government to accelerate the introduction of a school Tcard for SSTS. Under the original integrated ticketing plans if a school Tcard was to be introduced it was going to follow some years after the adult and concession Tcards. There are approximately 610,000 NSW students (285,000 in Tcard area) receiving free school travel benefits.
The political decision to introduce interim SSTS and bring forward a school Tcard has caused massive problems for industry and the Government. The Government introduced an interim SSTS Tcard system whereby a low function (interim) school Tcard would attempt to capture the boarding of every student every time they got on the bus. This was done without understanding the consequences of the actions. This was compounded by the problem that the central student database that the Ministry was using was not stable and lacked the ability to hot list cards that should not be in use.
Students have also been required to carry the school Tcard as well as their normal bus pass for the past two years. This has dramatically complicated the process of determining eligibility because quite often the student will not have both his bus pass and Tcard with him at the time of boarding. The problems of the school Tcard are further compounded when the industry learnt that schools are not routinely updating the central database when student records change. The industry estimates that there is 25% churn of student eligibility requirements every year. This has led to the situation where for the 280,000 eligible school students in the Tcard area approx 350,000 Tcards have been issued. The Government is saying that when they move to the full school Tcard the oversupply problem will be solved.
The Government sets the eligibility criteria for free school travel, but expects the operator to enforce the eligibility. The old system allowed sufficient discretion that could match the variable travel patterns of children. Children's travel patterns and behaviour show it is not uncommon for them to forget their pass or need to under ride or override or transfer at different times which may not strictly match their eligibility. If operators attempted to enforce the letter of the Government's eligibility criteria, there would be serious delays to the operation of the network, and parents and community would be concerned about the level of bureaucracy and lack of common sense.
The operators have always taken a practical approach to their duty of care and in general do not refuse student travel under SSTS students if they cannot reasonably ascertain their eligibility or ability to pay a fare. This can be a conflict with the Government's requirements.
Even without enforcing strict compliance to the Tcard SSTS eligibility rules, the two years of interim school Tcard has been a failure and created a culture that will mean that the Government's attempt to introduce a higher function school Tcard with both tag on and tag off functions is unlikely to work. The interim Tcard is tag on only.
Work is underway to try and establish what business rules apply for the full functional school Tcard which is to be a tag on tag off system that checks eligibility by using the functions on the card or the software in the ticket machine or back-end system. There are at least 17 different scenarios for which business rules need to be developed, to cater for everyday circumstances when a valid boarding will not be recorded (eg. student forgot to tag off). The only way that this can work is to return the discretion to the operator for enforcing eligibility like occurred before school Tcard was introduced. For the system to work we need to go back to a formula based system. The formulae can be based on boardings and cover all the duty of care contingencies needed to ensure smooth operations.
BCA continues to advise the Government that the school Tcard should be reviewed. However, the Government has based its new funding model for Metropolitan bus services on capturing every boarding for every student for every trip, and they are now realising that the only way that this can work is for a formula to be used to factor in that for every 100 trips approximately only 66 eligible boardings get recorded. If they do not give clear discretion for exercising duty of care and expect operators to comply with a government eligibility, the system will not work.
Students and parents will quickly realise that the requirement to ask students to tag off the bus as well as tag on is not practical. With only 66 out of a hundred boardings being captured (BCA estimate) for students getting on the bus it will be much less for students getting off. This is even without regard for buses with centre/back doors.
The Government, by introducing the interim school Tcard has created an enormous problem as the full school Tcard system they are proposing is intended to work the same as it would for an adult fare paying passenger. However, the difference is that the adult fare paying passenger has a financial incentive to tag off as if he or she does not a penalty fare will be deducted from the Tcard purse. However if a student fails to tag off, the Government pays the fare and there is no appropriate incentive for the student to do it correctly, unless they are forced to do so by the driver which would create unnecessary conflict and seriously delay the operations of the bus.
The industry is waiting to see how long it will take the Government to realise it needs to take a different approach to school Tcard for SSTS students. Most remember two years ago when the government asked all operators and drivers to fill out a form every time a student did not have a valid Tcard or bus pass. This was completely unworkable and it took the Government less than a week to abandon the process. Interim school Tcard is a very expensive method of fixing up a student data base, which seems to be the only task it is assisting.
The BCA understands there is no agreement between MOT/Government and schools to keep the student data base up to date. With a 25% churn of students and less than 15% of schools regularly notifying MoT of changes of eligibility then the capturing of every board scenario is flawed when the schools are not updating the central records in any case.
Development of the adult and concession holder Tcard is also troubled by bureaucratic and political process. Technology which is operating effectively in many jurisdictions has to be matched to culture and operating environment of a particular city.
It also has to meet a number of objectives including being simple to use, convenient and value for money for the passenger. These criteria are not all being met in the Sydney example.
One problem is that the design of the system has been based on the 20 year old fare structure and ticketing products that have been progressively patched, rather than starting with an efficient, simple integrated fare, as well as integrated payment method.
The design of the full Tcard system is also affected by the resources and technical ability of the contractor and the Government's ability to manage the project. The emphasis appears to be on contract management, even if the contract may be wrong, rather than project outcomes.
Extensive software development is needed to replicate the existing structures and complicated products. This is a difficult task and introduces considerable risk. Every bus route section point and the bus stop needs to be mapped and every change monitored and adjusted.
Every place a person can access a bus or a train or ferry, software is needed to have the full function of the multitude of products available at all locations.
When one studies the catalogue of the number of buses, bus routes, section points, bus stops, train stations, ferries and wharfs and multiplies this by the number of combinations of fare products and combinations of Tcard holders, you start to get an idea of the problem.
The need for digital mapping technology to facilitate every transaction and every change of bus or train or ferry circumstance has also been underestimated.
Operators feel there has been a lack of coordination between the Ministry and Tcard project on mapping requirements which has resulted in considerable additional work. Keeping up to date maps of every bus route (including school specials which change frequently at certain times) has been seriously underestimated.
The BCA has been attempting to have a complete review of the Tcard project and has advocated change - refer to the industry's 10 point plan.
STA and private operators have been holding off replacing their existing ticketing equipment because of the promise of new equipment from the new Tcard project. The continual delay in rolling out new ticketing equipment is adding to the cost and inefficiency of the present system. Some operators that already have their own Smartcards will have to phase them out.
If you use a Tcard in preference to paying cash you should receive a financial benefit in doing so. The benefit of getting more people onto public transport will support the Government's introduction of the simplified fare system with discounts for use of the Tcard. The present IPART and Government process of setting fares does not appear to adequately reflect the environmental, economic and social benefits of growing public transport. Treasury and IPART seem more focused on narrower cost recovery and STA efficiency arguments ahead of the benefits of growing public transport overall.
It is essential for Sydney to receive an effective and efficient
smartcard transport system that is convenient, reliable and simple to
use but we appear some distance away from receiving it.