- Verifying concession entitlements is complex and high-risk. It will be done in later stages after the system is up and running for full fare passengers travelling in the existing Myki area. In other words full fare passengers will be able to pay with credit or myki cards but concession passengers will just have myki for a while yet.
- VAGO found that DTP couldn't really quantify benefits or demonstrate value for money. Thus continuing a tradition of haphazard administration going back at least 35 years with four ticketing systems under eight premiers.
There is a much better summary than the above and some discussion on the Reddit thread below:
Where to from here for modernised Myki?
History almost always repeats with public transport ticketing systems in Victoria. No other Australian state has made heavier weather of rolling out new ticketing systems than Victoria. Symptoms include much-publicised project time and cost blow-outs. And megalitres of newspaper headline ink.
There have also been performance issues but efforts to fix them for both Metcard and Myki made reliability at least acceptable in the last few years before the next system took over. In contrast scratch tickets were never successful (except for fare evaders) so the system got replaced.
The above did not mean that there were not some functionality limitations that the subsequent ticketing system tried to fix. And one poor decision can set a bad path that ripples for years.
Myki was intended to be a dual ticket system. Regular passengers would have durable cards that they could top up while occasional passengers would have a disposable short term ticket option.
They could have gone two ways with the short term ticket. Either it could be an expensive to produce cardboard ticket with the electronic smarts to open station barriers or a cheap paper ticket that needed to be shown to an attendant.
The project opted for the electronic cardboard ticket. Which came into use when myki started in Geelong. There was a time that you could see discarded short-term Mykis on the ground there. Their spiral antennas were visible when you held them up to the light. Short-term tickets worked but were expensive to produce, especially relative to concession fares.
The Myki project was then in a lot of trouble, frequently making headlines for cost and time blow-outs. Premier John Brumby later said that he received wrong advice from the then DoT regarding the choice of KAMCO to deliver and regretted not challenging it.
The incoming Baillieu Coalition government of 2010 reviewed the Myki project. The project too far advanced to scrap, it proceeded in a reduced scope form. The cut meant that some parts of the state would not get Myki. There would also be no Myki ticket vending machines on trams and no short-term ticket option.
Hence even casual travellers would have to find a Myki outlet, pay for a piece of plastic they might never use more than once and then top it up with enough to pay the fare. And it would be awkward if they wanted to get a refund of unused credit or return their card.
The descoped Myki was fine for regular train commuters but a pain for tourists and other occasional users. Myki's clunkiness won it no friends amongst various civic and opinion leaders (the same people who also gripe about our lack of airport rail).
A bidding war during the 2014 election campaign led to the (counterproductive) CBD free tram zone being created, possibly exacerbated by Myki's issues. And the state government contracted with Conduent to update myki to allow credit card and mobile payments - something else that would help visitors and occasional users.
Unlike trams, Myki card top-ups were offered on buses. But that was suspended during (and not resumed after) the pandemic. With paying hard and evasion easy, fare dodging went through the roof with DTP's attitudes towards evasion oscillating between denial and apathy.
Things might have worked out differently had paper been chosen for the short-term ticket medium. Per-ticket costs (a few cents) would have been lower. Thus it might have escaped the descoping under the Coalition. There would have been fewer hassles for occasional travellers, less fare evasion on buses and likely less of a perceived need for updates to support credit card payments.
Claimed advantages of cardboard short-term tickets opening barriers may have been over-stated as the vast majority of passengers entering stations would be using durable Mykis. Governments could instead have concentrated on matters more central to providing good service, such as not descoping infrastructure on projects such as Regional Rail Link and Metro Tunnel and improved buses, instead.
Back to today's reality. Below is the time-line from the VAGO report.
Phase 3 involves extensions to more passengers (concession holders) and more areas (those not in the myki areas). The latter is potentially beneficial for areas like South Gippsland that are relatively close to Melbourne yet are still on paper tickets because their train lines closed years ago all their transport is provided by coach.
The audit flagged verifying concession entitlements as a complication. That's both for DTP administratively (with 150 agreements needed with concession authorities) and for the customer with use of an online portal involved. The concession platform is expected to cost $34m over 10 years (on top of $1.96b over 15 years for the main contract).
Then there's the political angle. This is an election year. The current long-standing state government is struggling in the polls. Even though it's generally poor policy, cutting fares has been politically fashionable as a 'cost of living' measure in some states. As has extending 'free' travel to more groups such as this government has done with under 18s (under the "Youth Myki" - confusingly the concession fare "Child Myki" is now just for 18 year-old adults!).
Especially if Myki costs about as much as it recoups in fares for some concession passenger trips the temptation to descope aspects of modernised Myki Phase 3 while also extending free (or very cheap) travel to some groups might just be too tempting for some in or out of government.
The next several months will be very interesting for transport fares and ticketing in Victoria!
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