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What did you expect from a goverment that cannot even get the finance right the system is working well now ??? why spend $15 million on something that is not needed you could have bought some new tram or trains with it they don't run well at all cause the goverment will not put the money into it and it our tax money that pays for it to run
What if you swipe and the machine fails to register? We will no doubt end up wearing that too.
Read failures have happened many times with the current ticketing system and there is no reason to believe it won't happen with myki. After all, myki never fails, that would make it the first piece of equipment ever invented that operates flawlessly.
So the tram arrives at Flinders street and nearly everyone wants to get off... but they have to 'swipe off' before doing so, along with the 60 other people alighting. Hmmm, I'm thinking we'll see many unhappy 'swipers'.
My 84 year old mother is still using pulic transport. She is concerned about the swipping off.
Whilst she is very much "with it" and will learn, there are many elderly persons who may not be able to cognitively be able to learn this new methodology.
Given the old age pension is so low, are our senior citizens going to have to pay these excessive amounts for not swiping off?
I have not yet mentioned mentally challenged people, they are also in this area of disadvantage.
I totally agree with a comment made above, at Flinders st and other stations along the loop it is going to cause chaos.
This is an exercise in covering up a poorly conceived and executed system. Once again, there should have been a meeting to discuss if they should cut and run, but then how does a political party admit they were wrong and spent too much money to back out. They simply don't.
I don't see where the benefits for commuters are with this methodology, I only see more systems on how to grab money.
Has anyone yet asked what processes to they have in place for a failure of a swiper? How do we get our money back when these failures happen, is their an appeals process.
This thing has grown into a monster, without consideration for our ageing community or for mentally challenged persons. Think of the further delays we will have with our transport now we must single file out of buses and trams.
It's almost laughable if it wasn't so wrong.
I was looking forward to being able to buy my weekly ticket online on a sunday.... until I see this:
"Customers who choose to top up their smartcard online or over the phone will have to wait at least 24 hours for the transaction to be processed."
Great... how useless is that.
I'm not at all surprised that MyKi has a potential issue with swipe off, a very similar program runs in Perth, and they have also had this issue. I would suggest that a webpage allowing you to type in the number listed below the barcode on your card, (plus your password) should allow you to view your transaction history, and, if neccessary, to query and correct any line items where a failure to scan off has caused the fulll amount to be debited. Whether this is part of the project scope is a different question.
The concept that in this day and age, the payments will not go through for a day - that looks like poor design. Why can't they just run the batch job to process the payments more often?
For those of you concerned about the time to swipe off at train stations, it should be no longer than the time it takes to walk past a swipe point - probably less time than it takes to walk through the barriers at Flinders st today, and the benefit of having a ticket which you don't have to remove from your wallet to scan could be enourmous, and make the process even quicker. In Hong Kong,where they have the Octopus card, they can also scan in shopping centres to earn bonus credit. You see women just walk past the scanner and hold up their handbags.
I can't see why queues on trams should be an issue - why do the scan readers have to be on the tram or bus - they should also be present at the tram and bus stops!
Finally on aged people - My next door neighbour is 87. Once I get her established with a card, it'll be easier, not harder for her! She doesn't have to find the correct ticket, or worry about whether she can be finished her shopping in under two hours, she just scans her card each time she gets on or off, and it'll charge her the lowest amount -job done!
Regarding the complaint that "payments will not go through for a day", I think this is just an issue of needing to information to the tram/train/bus which can't be guaranteed in less than 24 hours. I don't think it is a matter of processing payments faster.
The official myki website says: "Please allow up to 24 hours for money topped up via the website or the call centre to be available on your myki. Top up on board a bus is immediate."
The Brisbane "go Card" system, works the same way, and copes a great deal of flak over it. What is more, they put the scanners at hip-height, with the display facing forward, so you can't see if it has recognized it
Brisbane's Go Card system is a terrible bottleneck.
1) The gates at inner city stations take a second or so to register the swipe, so instead of a smooth flow of people through everyone stops to wait to see if their swipe worked or not, or to wait for the gates to swing open.
2) On the same gates, you have no chance of reading the display that outputs the result and your remaining balance without stopping, bending down, and squinting at it.
3) At suburban stations the displays are prone to fogging up at the slightest bit of humidity or rain, making them impossible to read.
4) Again at suburban stations when going home, the line of Go Card holders waiting to swipe off is long and moves slowly past the machine, while paper ticket holders walk off the platform and out of the station with no delays at all.
5) On days when trains are delayed or cancelled, if you wait more than 20 minutes on a platform before giving up and going for a bus/taxi/your car, you get slugged a maximum fee as you swipe back off the platform despite having travelled nowhere.
6) Early adopters who got slugged the $10 card fee now get the news that everyone else gets them free from now on.
7) My card never does an auto top up despite Translink storing my credit card details. A simple auto top up setting and an alert email to say its happened would save me a lot of time logging onto the site to top it up.
My advise is dont use MIKI at all..I plan on using my paper tickets as long as possible. Ms Kosky has already said that they wont fully cut over from paper to MIKI until at least 50% of trips are done via MIKI. So if everyone rejects this system, it will be a long time until its fully deployed and in use. Lets show this government how much a white elephant this system really is.
What is stopping people swiping off before they get to their stop? Surely the con would work both ways...
Also, how do ticket inspectors verify that you've even swiped on?
It all sounds like another bureaucratic CON to me. Just another public RIP OFF to top up the government coffers.
I gave up using public transport & went back to a car, since it was so inefficient and time consuming. A 10 minute car journey was taking me upwards of an hour & two tram changes because no track exists between Kings Way & St Kilda Rd.
I don't think I'll ever return to public transport, unless the dingdongs who run it, make it comfortable, easy & less costly. It just proves school dropouts & Art degrees don't make for good politicians or administrators!
Will they EVER recover the huge budget overrun from the fares..Doubtful! Be less expensive to hire conductors & fare collectors.
Are they smart cards if you need to physically swipe?
Why aren't the cards chipped so that as you enter or exit the bus, the card is read and the appropriate amount deducted?
Perth has a very similar system. You have to swipe on and off. If you fail to swipe off, you get slugged. You can call up and correct it, but I don't know how easy or difficult this is as I've never done it.
Reading Paul's comments, it seems like Perth's system isn't quite as bad as Brisbane's - there is an auto top-up option, and we don't really get the same problems with humidity. It does suffer from the main points about the delays, though, because often not everybody has their card ready, the card might not scan properly, and so on.
As Janet said, elderly people in particular might be slow to learn and use the system. It is also, as a few people mention, a problem in the city where everyone is getting off at the same time (for both buses and trains, and I expect it would be no different for trams).
Also, the reason they don't put a machine at every bus stop is that there are many, many more bus stops than buses, so the cost would be over the top - there would need to be a machine at every single stop, even in suburban streets and out-of-the-way places. I expect it would be similar for trams.
They spent $1.3bn on this system... when there are already systems used in Perth and Brisbane, which surely they could have just used? (Let me guess, they were going to do it better...)
Or - here's a novel concept - they could make public transport *free* and save the $1.3bn... It is meant to be "public" transport after all... isn't it?
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So you have to swipe when you hop on the tram, and you have to swipe again when you hop off it. I would probably stick to the tram tickets that we are using now. I don't want to be stuck behind a queue when hopping on and off a tram or train.