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Action for Public Transport (N.S.W.) Inc.

NEWS RELEASE: Time to discard Tcard

posted Friday 8 December 2006
A consumer group has called for Tcard, the planned smartcard transit ticket, to be scrapped, saying that the total expenditure of nearly $400m will achieve little worthwhile.

Allan Miles, a spokesman for Action for Public Transport (APT), said that a different ticket, better suited to passengers' needs, is required. "The Tcard development is flawed and expensive," he said. "Problems will arise in daily use, and transit riders will receive no net benefit."

"Work must be halted while a thorough review of costs and objectives is conducted," Mr Miles said. "Then a conscious decision must be made either to kill the project, to complete it, or to go for a simpler option."

"What the public wants," Mr Miles said, "is a simple ticket at a simple price that can be used for travel on any mode all over Sydney."

Mr Miles said that the Tcard project is just bumbling along with no clear objectives, no benchmarks, repeated missed deadlines and no high level stop-or-go reviews.

"The stated project cost has blown out to $367 million," Mr Miles said, "consisting of $106 million for development, plus $26.1 million per year for ten years to run it."

Mr Miles said that $106 million is only the cost since the contract was signed. It does not include the years of development before 2003 under the name Integrated Ticketing Project. "It also does not include the parallel development and operational costs being borne by State Rail, State Transit, other bus companies and by Sydney Ferries," Mr Miles said.

"The advantages are largely illusory," said Mr Miles. "The Tcard web site lists seven benefits for passengers using the card," he said, "but apart from the first one, they are all just accessories - technological bling."

See http://www.tcard.com.au/.

The prime benefit, says the blurb, eliminates the need to have separate tickets for train, bus and ferry travel, no matter where in the Greater Sydney Metropolitan Area public transport is used. "But," said Mr Miles, "the popular TravelPass and DayTripper tickets already provide this benefit to much of Sydney and Newcastle. These tickets could easily be extended to cover the whole region at a fraction of the Tcard cost." "This has already been done with the Pensioner Excursion Ticket," he said.

"The anticipated high public take-up of Tcard is doubtful," Mr Miles said. "The government says that the machines can read smart cards faster than the current magnetic stripe tickets, but that will make little difference if very few people buy the cards." Mr Miles said that the public is not clamouring for a smart card. "This is a case of a technological solution in search of a problem," he said.

"The need for every passenger to tag-off when leaving the bus will cause chaos," said Mr Miles, "and will also bring problems on railway stations and ferry wharves."

Mr Miles said that the world had rushed by while the Tcard project was still getting its boots on. "Distance based fares are old hat," he said. "They have been superseded by zoned or timed fares, and the Unsworth reforms have changed the way buses operate in NSW."

"The government must first produce a fares and ticketing policy," Mr Miles said, "then design a computer system to implement that policy. Right now they have the cart before the horse."

Mr Miles said that the system has been designed for the government,, the transport operators and the bank holding the kitty " but not for passengers. "Transit users have never been considered as stakeholders, and have not been involved in the design of the new ticket," Mr Miles said. "At meetings we were told what would happen, and then were invited to ask questions. There was no true consultation."

"Users of Tcard will find that the cost of each segment of a journey is deducted from their stored value at the full fare for each trip," said Mr Miles. "Apart from a promise to store discounted bus TravelTen tickets on the SmartCard," said Mr Miles, "there has, after six years, still been no explanation of how the system will give discounts to users of periodical tickets such as TravelPasses and rail weeklies."

"The delay in implementing Tcard is causing other ticketing reforms to be deferred," said Mr Miles. "The extension of TravelTen, DayTripper and TravelPass tickets to the private bus passengers could all have been done years ago, but this task has been moved to the end of the rainbow along with Tcard." Mr Miles said that TravelTens and TravelPasses have been around in one form or another for twenty years, and there were predecessors on the tramway system a hundred years ago. "There's nothing hard about it," he said, "but it seems that statistics for contract administration are more important than benefits for passengers."

Mr Miles said that school students had been using Tcards for some time now, but only for statistics for contract payments to bus companies. "Students don't pay individual fares," said Mr Miles, "and don't have to tag-off. This is only a schoolyard exercise, not the trenches."

"The Tcard project has been top of the Key Issues list in the audit report on the Transport Ministry for the past three years," Mr Miles said, "and for good reason. There is the prospect of a great deal of taxpayers' money going down the drain."

See http://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/.

Mr Miles recalled that in May 2003 Sydney Water wrote off $61 million when it aborted a failed attempt to establish a state-wide computerised billing system for its customers. "It would be wise for the minister to examine that case," Mr Miles said, "and see what the problems were. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Contact:Allan Miles9516-1906
Kevin Eadie9819-6052




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