Trial stalls as Sydney travel card is shunned

A Sydney Morning Herald report says that a $20 million, three-year trial by school students of the long-awaited travel smartcard has turned into a farce, with large numbers of drivers, bus operators and students rejecting the technology.

Ministry of Transport figures obtained by the Herald show only 12 per cent of the 285,000 Tcards issued to students are being scanned as children board their school buses.

The dismal take-up casts new doubt over the future of the Tcard, which was scheduled for the 2000 Olympics, but which has been repeatedly delayed.

Now, a full-scale commuter trial will not begin until early next year, and full implementation is not expected until the end of 2009.

“Even the low-function School Tcard is not working,” the head of the Bus and Coach Association, Darryl Mellish, said. “How can we be confident the significantly more complicated adult Tcard will work given the problems that have already been reported?”

School Tcard, a simplified travel smartcard, was introduced in January 2005 for use by school students on private buses as part of the State Government’s standard student travel subsidy scheme.

The card was meant to provide data on how many school students each bus was collecting, and therefore how large a subsidy the Government should pay each bus operator. But over the year to April, use of the cards plummeted; about 250,000 students chose not to scan their card as they boarded the bus.

And the Government has continued to pay bus operator subsidies that have been calculated on estimates and hand-counted student numbers, rather than the electronic data supplied by cards.

Because of repeated problems downloading Tcard data, students have been asked to carry both the electronic card and the paper pass for three years – and as drivers are not allowed to leave behind students who forget either pass, use of the electronic system has stalled.

“The industry feels the interim school Tcard should be scrapped, and the system revert back to the paper bus pass at least until a workable system is available,” Mr Mellish said.

“We are in the third year of new contracts and not one operator has been paid on actual boardings recorded, because the system is not working.”

The ministry’s media spokeswoman, Chrissy Flanagan, said the take-up figure had dipped because it was derived from the total number of cards issued since the trial began.

“A substantial proportion of the students have left school … and as such are no longer using them,” she said. “When Tcard is fully implemented these cards will be invalidated.”

Technical problems had also hampered the data collection, she said.

In a statement issued on Friday, the company contracted to install the travel card, ERG, revealed a $15 million loss in the past financial year.

The Perth technology company has weathered a staggering total loss of almost $600 million since 2002, but remains confident its finances will improve once it starts receiving contractual payments from the NSW Government when well-overdue benchmarks are met.

The payments have been postponed while software glitches plague minor trials on State Transit buses travelling from the Kingsgrove depot and Ashfield train station.

It expects to recoup unbilled revenue of $131 million spent on its large projects around the world, including Sydney.

Report by The Mole