It’s a touchy subject, but next-gen myki might already be on the ropes

The legal stand-off between the Victorian government and US-based company Conduent over the contract for the state’s incoming myki replacement raises the prospect of taxpayers once again being on the hook for a ticketing-system cost blowout.

It’s a story as familiar as a Seinfeld rerun – but without the laughs.

Myki has frustrated users since its inception.Credit: Meredith O’Shea

Steve Bracks’ Labor government first committed to bringing in smartcard ticketing for the state’s trains, trams and buses in 2004, at a cost of just under $1 billion. It promised the system would be up and running by 2007, consigning paper Metcards to history.

It ultimately took seven more years for myki to become fully operational, and cost the state about 55 per cent more – $1.55 billion – to roll it out.

Commuters were justified in asking where the extra $550 million had gone, given the system’s long list of stubborn glitches and confounding shortcomings.

You could never top up on trams; online top-ups took up to 24 hours to take effect; people’s cards expired without warning after four years; machines spat out unwanted receipts; slow readers at station gates caused huge queues at peak hour.

“Poor initial planning resulted in myki’s original scope and contract being vaguely specified and overly ambitious,” Victoria’s auditor-general concluded in a scathing report in 2015.

Deficiencies in the original contract were largely to blame for the government’s failure to deliver myki anywhere near on budget or on time, the auditor-general said.

Despite the system’s many troubles, myki’s operator, NTT Data, won a $690 million, seven-year contract extension in 2016, beating out rivals who operated more advanced ticketing systems in cities such as Sydney and London.

It wasn’t until that contract expired last year that the state Labor government finally made the call to cut myki loose and award Conduent a $1.7 billion, 15-year contract to take over the ticketing system.

The government promised trials would begin in 2024 as part of a progressive phase-in of a new “contactless payment” system, in which customers could touch on with a bank card or smartphone.

But The Age revealed on Sunday that the government and Conduent are already fighting over the terms of their contract. The news comes with a disturbing sense of deja vu for Victorians.

Already, Conduent appears to be arguing that the cost and complexity of introducing a new ticketing system is greater than what the parties first agreed to.

Already, the promise to trial the new system has been scaled back from several towns to one, while the deadline to launch the trial this year looms closer.

And the delay in getting a contactless payment system off the ground is making Melbourne look increasingly archaic: contactless payments are available on all public transport in Sydney, on trams, trains and ferries in Brisbane, and on trams and buses in Adelaide, while Perth is currently in the process of rolling them out.

Premier Jacinta Allan insisted on Sunday that the regional trial would begin before the end of the year, and that the Transport Department and Conduent were ironing out issues “within the parameters of the contract”.

“This is a really complex technology project, putting next-generation technology on one of the world’s most complex public transport systems,” Allan said.

A failure to foresee or manage complexity led the last state government to lose control of myki’s rollout.

Victorians must hope the current regime has learnt from myki’s colossal failure, or taxpayers could be paying more than first agreed to for its replacement, while touching on and off with our unloved myki cards for a while longer.

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