Sydney smart card problems echo Vancouver’s Compass

Glitch-laden smart card readers. Delays. Millions of dollars in unexpected costs.

That’s certainly the story of Vancouver’s troubled Compass Card. But a related digital payment system half a world away has been suffering similar growing pains: the Opal card in Sydney, Australia.

The Opal Card and the Compass Card share the same private contractor, Cubic, a San-Diego based weapons system manufacturer. News of the problems there have TransLink’s critics here watching closely as the fare gates close on Monday.

“Tomorrow’s a big day and it’s important to make sure the service is accessible,” said Jane Dyson of the Disability Alliance on Sunday.

The Opal card started as a plan to unify fare payment systems in the ferries, buses and trains that get millions of people around Greater Sydney.

“To make travelling easy and convenient, a new electronic ticketing system is being introduced across Greater Sydney,“ a woman’s voice says on a promotional video for the Opal Card by agency Transport for New South Wales, calling the Opal card a “proven technology.”

But soon the system wasn’t working as advertised.

7News Sydney reported that passengers on some of Sydney’s 5000 buses are being “ripped off because of faulty Opal Card readers.”

Riders either don’t pay when the readers don’t work when they “tap on” to the system – meaning less revenue for the transit agency, the news station reported in 2015.

And if they do tap on, they get overcharged because they can’t tap off on a broken reader – a flaw that would mean their cards get billed the maximum amount.

And riders were taking out their frustration on drivers, 7News reported.

“It’s really a debacle. The drivers have just about had enough,” said Chris Preston of the Rail, Tram and Bus Union.

A fare loophole had passengers jogging between stations to tap readers in a way that would unlock free trips. The government handed out $190 million Australian dollars – worth about the same as Canadian dollars – in the loophole, estimating that the net loss of revenue was $34 million.

“It’s simply chaos. It’s ridiculous that this is still going on time and time again,” Ryan Park, the Shadow Transport Minister told Nine News Sydney.

That free fare loophole is closing, but it’s been a rough ride for everyone involved.

Here, $23 million in cost overruns plagued the Compass Card’s start. But delays piled up when it was revealed that the bus readers couldn’t reliably “tap out” a rider in the correct zone, which could lead to extra charges.

The system moved forward again when all bus trips became one zone trips, with no one being quite sure what effect that change would have on revenues.

But there was another major hiccup when some people with disabilities found they couldn’t open the fare gates. TransLink promised to keep those gates open until the agency could come up with a solution: that solution is manning the gates with someone at peak times to let anyone in who can’t access the gates.

With open faregates, the plan to fight fare evasion hasn’t materialized, and a $7 million a year fare evasion problem has now been combined with a $12 million a year cost to operate the gates.

Some 220,000 riders per week aren’t tapping out, which could mean more overcharging, and means that TransLink isn’t getting the data it hoped to get through the smart card to better plan routes.

Vancouver and Sydney aren’t the only cities to have seen problems. In Chicago, the Cubic-built Ventra system was sued by both riders and the Chicago Transportation Authority for overcharging and offering millions in free fares.

Cubic didn’t return a request for comment on this story.

If the gates close it would be a major milestone for TransLink and Cubic, some six years after a contract was signed in 2010 to implement the Compass System.