In an alternate reality, Melbourne’s new ticketing system was awarded to ERG Group (an Australian company who ran ticketing systems all around the world including the old metcard). The system was delivered 5 years earlier, leveraging the exact same technology as the Octopus card in Hong Kong (which ERG also built/ran). In that reality, ERG did not go out of business a decade or so ago. Today we’d be touching on and off with our phones and not even bothering with physical cards.

The Melbourne ticketing system was instead given to a bunch of mates of politicians who had no idea what they were doing. They had never built a ticketing system and tried to customise some off-the-shelf kit for the city. They never got that system working properly. They couldn’t get GPS working on trams (too much metal). They couldn’t get balance synchronisation between cards and servers working right. Many people were mistakenly fined for not touching on, when later records showed they actually did. The readers were hopelessly slow for simple use, leading to actual queues at the barriers to get in and out of stations.

And here we are 15 years later, some American general government services company is trying to untangle this mess. They’re not a specialiased ticketing company, either. They probably do deserve more money to fix the issues, but why couldn’t the tender be awarded for once to a company who does this stuff as their bread-and-butter?