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Combed Thunderclap posted:Also this is awesome, and I'd like to humbly submit a request for "The Gang Builds a Tunnel" and/or "The Gang Gets Rid of Tokens" because I'm beginning to take a sick delight in just how badly transit projects can fail ( All of the payment transitions are difficult because the 1) Technology is over promised and under delivered; 2) fare policies at each agency are drastically difficult and involve building business rules engines from scratch for each agency deploying a new fare collection system; and 3) there an incredible amount of institutional inertia at these agencies. There are about 400 people at SEPTA whose job it is to man the booth where SEPTA sells fare tokens, when they go to a smart card based system those people are basically out of a job. However, they attendants don't just sell fares, they also act as some level of customer service where the agency can't afford someone full time. Changing that over at a public agency where the people are unionized is difficult to say the least. To compound these issues, fare collection vendors are moving to an integrative approach where they build the back end software that manages the business rules and purchase the turnstiles, validators, and vending machines from a third party. So now you also have a bunch of integration issues on top of your fare policy development issues. Then throw in consultants and the agency and you have a recipe for a complex system that on paper looks really easy ("Let's just get rid of tokens and give people smart cards guys, its not hard!") but implementing is extremely difficult. SEPTA's Key project was supposed to the first open payment system in North America. Xerox, then ACS, oversold the capabilities of the system, but there are other issues like fare policy definition and construction which are holding it back. Just wait until NYC puts their RFP on the street for an open fare system which is suppose to happen in the next year. You are complaining about metro cards not working now...
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Apr 8, 2016 20:26
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) and nothing seems to fail more spectacularly than the multi-year processes of A) tunneling (see: Big Dig) or B) transitioning payment methods (see: Melbourne's $1.5 billion myki debacle)
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 21:14 |
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Did WMATA finally kill the Accenture next gen fare system?
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Oct 18, 2016 19:44
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