Keeping an eye on Auckland’s progress towards integrated ticketing over the past few years has been like experiencing Chinese Water Torture, or bashing one’s head against a wall repeatedly with frustration at the slowness and seeming ineptitude of all those involved. What should be a fairly straightforward process – OK, everyone gets the same ticketing system going and we work out a fair way to share around the money – has seemingly become more difficult than the search for extra-terrestrial lifeforms, or attempts to find world peace.
However, it seems like in the past few months we have finally started making some progress. Some important legislation was passed last year, giving ARTA a lot more teeth when it comes to enforcing integrated ticketing; we have seen them ask for tenders for the contract to build and operate a smart-card integrated ticketing system; and now we have some news (of course all the important news is always buried in the depths of the technology section) that a highly experienced French Company, Thales, seems to have won the contract. There is still a wait for confirmation of this, but Infratil’s tantrum in response to the possible news means that it seems fairly like that Thales have got the contract.
I’m happy that Thales have got the contract (if indeed that is the case). They sound like an experienced company – having “won deals to supply smartcard payment and integrated ticketing systems for Beijing, Toronto, Holland, Dubai, Madrid and most recently Oslo.” Furthermore, I am also happy that Infratil have not won the contract, largely because having a company that operates about 75% of Auckland’s buses also operating its ticketing system seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Perhaps Infratil could have done it a bit cheaper, but I’d rather get it right first time myself. Wellington’s Snapper Card system is fairly impressive, but many have called the cards “dumb smart-cards” as supposedly you can’t do a lot of things (like topping them up online or using them to store trips rather than just cash value) that are possible on the ‘smarter’ cards used in London, Hong Kong and so forth.
It is excellent that we are seeing some progress made on integrated ticketing. Hopefully by the end of the year we will have a “transition” paper-based integrated system. And then by the end of next year or in early 2011 we will see the rollout of a full smart-card system. Along with electric trains we might even start seeing the first signs of a 21st century public transport system.
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