6 ms·

It’s surprising the things that have been caught offguard by this. In Melbourne, the ticketing terminal in 200 trams and 2500 buses is now broken. https://www

It’s surprising the things that have been caught offguard by this. In Melbourne, the ticketing terminal in 200 trams and 2500 buses is now broken. https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/free-ride-as-myki-hit-with-widespread-glitches-after-3g-shutdown-20241107-p5koo6.html https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/free-ride-as-myk...

teractiveodular 2y ago
This is about par for course for Myki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myki TL;DR: Melbourne spent over $1.5B developing their very own tap to pay public transport card from scratch, which was and remains slow, glitchy and is already outdated (eg doesn't support payment with contactless credit/debit cards). Meanwhile, Sydney deployed an off the shelf system from Cubic at a fraction of the cost and the rollout was about as smooth as it gets.
- bigger_cheese 2y ago
  I don't live in either city, I have family who live in both Melbourne and Sydney so I travel to each city relatively frequently at least a couple of times a year. My experience was Melbourne had their system years before Sydney had Opal cards. I can distinctly remember first time using tap on/off card to get around Melbourne and thinking how much more convenient it was then needing to use Paper ticket machines Sydney had at the time. Wikipedia lists 2008 adoption for Melb vs 2012 for Syd that seems to align with my memory. So might have just been curse of them being an early adopter.
  - averageRoyalty 2y ago
    You're right on timing, but it wasn't that. The entire rollout was a clusterfuck. There are heaps of news articles from 2006-2008 about it.
  - quink 2y ago
    Brisbane had trials for a Cubic system in 2006 with a full rollout by 2008. It went, broadly speaking, OK. The machines at stations were a near unusable mess and the locations you could buy the cards from were ridiculously limited.
  - killingtime74 2y ago
    Other countries had it before Melbourne and rolled it out smoothly. Hong Kong launched theirs in 1997. 11 years prior. Melbourne could have easily bought it off the shelf. Melbourne was not early by any measure
    - sytringy05 2y ago
      The issue with myki wasn't the card technology, it was the fact they wanted to have standardised ticketing across the entire state. eg Tap on a bus, tram and train in Melbourne, get off in Wangaratta and tap on to a bus there. There was going to be something like 29 zones, and all the requirements / edge cases / mucking around sent the cost through the roof.
      - killingtime74 2y ago
        What I'm trying to say is that it was mismanagement, which was well known at the time. Hong Kong also has Metro, trains (at the time), buses, trams, ferries. All from different companies. In Melbourne they are actually mostly under the same government agency.
    - pwagland 2y ago
      The Hong Kong system's backend, and large parts of the frontend, was also written by an Australian company, ERG at the time, now VIX. So there was plenty of local skills that _could_ have been used.
      - killingtime74 2y ago
        That's interesting history! It goes to show what could have been if they asked around.
    - mistrial9 2y ago
      people in hong kong had cellphones before the year 2000
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  It's hilarious that you think the NSW Opal system is better than Myki, because compared to overseas rollouts it's still a trash fire. There's still no travel card integration with phones, the only mobile device tap that's supported are standard credit cards -- but you can't give one of those to a child because you can't restrict a credit card to only allowing travel! It also doesn't track usage properly, so you can't tell what state you're in (tapped on or off). They actually did develop a digital wallet card and matching phone app, rolled it out... to some country town... and then quietly dropped it. My completely unfounded accusation is that someone in Transport NSW was getting kickbacks from Mastercard and/or Visa and a travel card app would have stopped the pork. The Opal card project cost hundreds of millions of dollars and took way too long to deploy, so calling it a "success" is only in relation to even worse projects.
  - tim-- 2y ago
    > There's still no travel card integration with phones This is not 100% accurate. There is no card integration, but the Opal app does allow you too see pre-paid balances. It does usually show the tapped on/off status, but it may be delayed by a few hours (so it's not completely useful) especially outside of metro areas. > They actually did develop a digital wallet card Which never worked on iOS, it was Android only iirc. > the only mobile device tap that's supported are standard credit cards You can use Samsung Pay. Make the card inaccessible for normal NFC/touch payments, and only allow Samsung Pay Transit. On iOS I think you can use Express Mode? https://support.apple.com/en-gb/105079 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/105079 We attempted smart card transport in NSW three times. TCard. There was another one that went bankrupt iirc. Arguably there is much greater success with Opal vs. Myki.
  - hilbert42 2y ago
    "It also doesn't track usage properly, so you can't tell what state you're in (tapped on or off)." Right, why can't I use a NFC app (of which I've tried many) to read my Opal card's state - the balance and whether I've tapped on and off? Frankly, it's a damn nuisance. NFC apps read lots of information about the card, type manufacturer number serial number etc. but nothing that's useful like one's remaining balance. Yes, they can encrypt parts of the card to protect security but there's no need to inconvenience users by not telling them their balance. Opal is, in effect, a machine-readable only system that takes power away from users. Thus, clearly its ergonomics are unacceptable. I've also an Opal card with a crack in it which means its internal antenna wire is broken and the card won't respond to the machine. Unfortunately, it has a credit of between $60 and $70 on it and getting that recredited has been such a pain to the extent that I'll have to dissolve the plastic and reconnect the wire. Yes, the card could have been registered but why should I have to tell the government everywhere I go? Similarly, the Opal system discriminates against those with confession cards in that they're tracked by default and their cards have a louder beep on machines that informs everyone nearby that the person is traveling at a cheaper rate. In my opinion, that's unacceptable and discriminatory (if necessary a ticket inspector could determine that with his handheld reader). When I was living in Vienna several decades ago there were multiple ways to buy tickets, singles, weekly, monthly and so on. One was a card strip with multiple segments on it. You'd fold over to a blank segment (a split-second operation) and insert it in a time/route stamping machine on the bus/tram or train and that stamp was valid for an hour on any transport even if you changed mid route. One could see with just one's eyes how much credit one had left and a ticket inspector could glance at the ticket and tell in an instant whether the ticket was valid or not. Also, the route number would tell him if you'd changed your mode of transport or not (that could be useful if one's latter transport was late, which it never was—Vienna's transport system is wonderful). The ergonomics of that old-fashioned mechanical system were excellent and it worked like a dream. Much of this modern IT tech is done just for the sake of it and for the smart to make a financial killing from the gullible. And I say that as an IT professional. It really annoys me that more people don't complain about poorly designed IT infrastructure that's barely fit for purpose. Like frogs in heating water, unfortunately we can be cajoled into accepting anything with minimal effort.
- averageRoyalty 2y ago
  Metcards were more reliable than either.
- ruthmarx 2y ago
  A city should be capable of rolling its own competently at less cost than it takes to engage Cubic to do so. Cubic is setting things up real nice to have exact data about a lot of peoples travels in cities all around the world. That could be some pretty valuable data.
  - fastball 2y ago
    Why should a city be able to do something more efficiently/effectively than a company which exists for that purpose?
    - ruthmarx 2y ago
      They could draw from a lot of people already employed, and they have no incentive to mark up the price.
      - chii 2y ago
        > They could draw from a lot of people already employed which means the city would need to pay above the existing wage for those people, since they're _already_ employed and would have no incentive to jump. > no incentive to mark up the price and have no incentive to try to save money or find novel efficiencies, since the money spent is not "theirs".
        ruthmarx 2y ago
        > which means the city would need to pay above the existing wage for those people, since they're _already_ employed and would have no incentive to jump. What? I'm talking about salaried employees already working for the city. > and have no incentive to try to save money or find novel efficiencies, since the money spent is not "theirs". Even if they are not trying to actively save money, they are not trying to actively make a profit so it would still be cheaper.
        fastball 2y ago
- jaza 2y ago
  Sydney's rollout was definitely not smooth! NSW spent a decade (late 90s - late 00s) trying to launch the "Tcard", after which time they had absolutely nothing to show except wasted $$ millions. Unlike Melbourne, Sydney still had ancient paper tickets well into the 2010s, which weren't even consistent across modes of transport (destination specific "one way / return from x to y" single use tickets for trains, zoned "travel ten" tickets for buses, etc), and which often had to be paid for with exact change in coins (and which often couldn't be purchased in advance). Opal only soft launched in 2012, it wasn't actually available on all modes of transport, for all ticket types, etc, until end of 2014.
  - CrispyKerosene 2y ago
    Not to mention the massive cost increase to those who previously bought yearly Zone 3 passes. I saw my transit costs increase overnight from $2200 per year to over $3500 with the introduction of Opal.
Spooky23 2y ago
My team supports an entity that had 3G infrastructure in the US. The carriers aggressively acted to move them to newer tech - including funding replacement modems and devices. I find it hard to fathom that this would be a surprise.
aryonoco 2y ago
In this particular case, that's the result of misconfiguration on the devices https://danielbowen.com/2024/11/09/myki-and-3g/ https://danielbowen.com/2024/11/09/myki-and-3g/ I have a certain amount of sympathy for Myki's operator in this case, this would have been a difficult edge case to test.
khuey 2y ago
That doesn't really surprise me. Here in San Francisco some of the city transit system's bus tracking equipment that they use for real time arrival predictions was still using 2G when the 2G network shut down in 2017. Then a different part of it was still using 3G when the 3G network shut down in 2022.
- more-nitor 2y ago
  idk what about temporarily shutting down 1/2~2 day(s) per week for 2 months right before fully shutting down? then we can know if something is affected by the full shutdown
  - RicoElectrico 2y ago
    That's called brownouts and incidentally is what OSM operations team did when disabling OAuth 1. https://en.osm.town/@osm_tech/112518295046590442 https://en.osm.town/@osm_tech/112518295046590442
- tiffanyh 2y ago
  I was expecting you to say how SF train system is still run off floppy disks. https://www.wired.com/story/san-francisco-floppy-disks-muni-upgrade/#:~:text=The%20city's%20light%2Drail%20system,them%20won't%20come%20cheap.&text=The%20San%20Francisco%20Municipal%20Transportation,light%20rail%20off%20floppy%20disks https://www.wired.com/story/san-francisco-floppy-disks-muni-....
- blendo 2y ago
  Is that why all the “next arrival time” displays on SF’s bus stops stopped working several years ago?

teractiveodular 2y ago

This is about par for course for Myki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myki TL;DR: Melbourne spent over $1.5B developing their very own tap to pay public transport card from scratch, which was and remains slow, glitchy and is already outdated (eg doesn't support payment with contactless credit/debit cards). Meanwhile, Sydney deployed an off the shelf system from Cubic at a fraction of the cost and the rollout was about as smooth as it gets.

bigger_cheese 2y ago
I don't live in either city, I have family who live in both Melbourne and Sydney so I travel to each city relatively frequently at least a couple of times a year. My experience was Melbourne had their system years before Sydney had Opal cards. I can distinctly remember first time using tap on/off card to get around Melbourne and thinking how much more convenient it was then needing to use Paper ticket machines Sydney had at the time. Wikipedia lists 2008 adoption for Melb vs 2012 for Syd that seems to align with my memory. So might have just been curse of them being an early adopter.
- averageRoyalty 2y ago
  You're right on timing, but it wasn't that. The entire rollout was a clusterfuck. There are heaps of news articles from 2006-2008 about it.
- quink 2y ago
  Brisbane had trials for a Cubic system in 2006 with a full rollout by 2008. It went, broadly speaking, OK. The machines at stations were a near unusable mess and the locations you could buy the cards from were ridiculously limited.
- killingtime74 2y ago
  Other countries had it before Melbourne and rolled it out smoothly. Hong Kong launched theirs in 1997. 11 years prior. Melbourne could have easily bought it off the shelf. Melbourne was not early by any measure
  - sytringy05 2y ago
    The issue with myki wasn't the card technology, it was the fact they wanted to have standardised ticketing across the entire state. eg Tap on a bus, tram and train in Melbourne, get off in Wangaratta and tap on to a bus there. There was going to be something like 29 zones, and all the requirements / edge cases / mucking around sent the cost through the roof.
    - killingtime74 2y ago
      What I'm trying to say is that it was mismanagement, which was well known at the time. Hong Kong also has Metro, trains (at the time), buses, trams, ferries. All from different companies. In Melbourne they are actually mostly under the same government agency.
  - pwagland 2y ago
    The Hong Kong system's backend, and large parts of the frontend, was also written by an Australian company, ERG at the time, now VIX. So there was plenty of local skills that _could_ have been used.
    - killingtime74 2y ago
      That's interesting history! It goes to show what could have been if they asked around.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    people in hong kong had cellphones before the year 2000
jiggawatts 2y ago
It's hilarious that you think the NSW Opal system is better than Myki, because compared to overseas rollouts it's still a trash fire. There's still no travel card integration with phones, the only mobile device tap that's supported are standard credit cards -- but you can't give one of those to a child because you can't restrict a credit card to only allowing travel! It also doesn't track usage properly, so you can't tell what state you're in (tapped on or off). They actually did develop a digital wallet card and matching phone app, rolled it out... to some country town... and then quietly dropped it. My completely unfounded accusation is that someone in Transport NSW was getting kickbacks from Mastercard and/or Visa and a travel card app would have stopped the pork. The Opal card project cost hundreds of millions of dollars and took way too long to deploy, so calling it a "success" is only in relation to even worse projects.
- tim-- 2y ago
  > There's still no travel card integration with phones This is not 100% accurate. There is no card integration, but the Opal app does allow you too see pre-paid balances. It does usually show the tapped on/off status, but it may be delayed by a few hours (so it's not completely useful) especially outside of metro areas. > They actually did develop a digital wallet card Which never worked on iOS, it was Android only iirc. > the only mobile device tap that's supported are standard credit cards You can use Samsung Pay. Make the card inaccessible for normal NFC/touch payments, and only allow Samsung Pay Transit. On iOS I think you can use Express Mode? https://support.apple.com/en-gb/105079 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/105079 We attempted smart card transport in NSW three times. TCard. There was another one that went bankrupt iirc. Arguably there is much greater success with Opal vs. Myki.
- hilbert42 2y ago
  "It also doesn't track usage properly, so you can't tell what state you're in (tapped on or off)." Right, why can't I use a NFC app (of which I've tried many) to read my Opal card's state - the balance and whether I've tapped on and off? Frankly, it's a damn nuisance. NFC apps read lots of information about the card, type manufacturer number serial number etc. but nothing that's useful like one's remaining balance. Yes, they can encrypt parts of the card to protect security but there's no need to inconvenience users by not telling them their balance. Opal is, in effect, a machine-readable only system that takes power away from users. Thus, clearly its ergonomics are unacceptable. I've also an Opal card with a crack in it which means its internal antenna wire is broken and the card won't respond to the machine. Unfortunately, it has a credit of between $60 and $70 on it and getting that recredited has been such a pain to the extent that I'll have to dissolve the plastic and reconnect the wire. Yes, the card could have been registered but why should I have to tell the government everywhere I go? Similarly, the Opal system discriminates against those with confession cards in that they're tracked by default and their cards have a louder beep on machines that informs everyone nearby that the person is traveling at a cheaper rate. In my opinion, that's unacceptable and discriminatory (if necessary a ticket inspector could determine that with his handheld reader). When I was living in Vienna several decades ago there were multiple ways to buy tickets, singles, weekly, monthly and so on. One was a card strip with multiple segments on it. You'd fold over to a blank segment (a split-second operation) and insert it in a time/route stamping machine on the bus/tram or train and that stamp was valid for an hour on any transport even if you changed mid route. One could see with just one's eyes how much credit one had left and a ticket inspector could glance at the ticket and tell in an instant whether the ticket was valid or not. Also, the route number would tell him if you'd changed your mode of transport or not (that could be useful if one's latter transport was late, which it never was—Vienna's transport system is wonderful). The ergonomics of that old-fashioned mechanical system were excellent and it worked like a dream. Much of this modern IT tech is done just for the sake of it and for the smart to make a financial killing from the gullible. And I say that as an IT professional. It really annoys me that more people don't complain about poorly designed IT infrastructure that's barely fit for purpose. Like frogs in heating water, unfortunately we can be cajoled into accepting anything with minimal effort.
averageRoyalty 2y ago
Metcards were more reliable than either.
ruthmarx 2y ago
A city should be capable of rolling its own competently at less cost than it takes to engage Cubic to do so. Cubic is setting things up real nice to have exact data about a lot of peoples travels in cities all around the world. That could be some pretty valuable data.
- fastball 2y ago
  Why should a city be able to do something more efficiently/effectively than a company which exists for that purpose?
  - ruthmarx 2y ago
    They could draw from a lot of people already employed, and they have no incentive to mark up the price.
    - chii 2y ago
      > They could draw from a lot of people already employed which means the city would need to pay above the existing wage for those people, since they're _already_ employed and would have no incentive to jump. > no incentive to mark up the price and have no incentive to try to save money or find novel efficiencies, since the money spent is not "theirs".
      - ruthmarx 2y ago
        > which means the city would need to pay above the existing wage for those people, since they're _already_ employed and would have no incentive to jump. What? I'm talking about salaried employees already working for the city. > and have no incentive to try to save money or find novel efficiencies, since the money spent is not "theirs". Even if they are not trying to actively save money, they are not trying to actively make a profit so it would still be cheaper.
        fastball 2y ago
jaza 2y ago
Sydney's rollout was definitely not smooth! NSW spent a decade (late 90s - late 00s) trying to launch the "Tcard", after which time they had absolutely nothing to show except wasted $$ millions. Unlike Melbourne, Sydney still had ancient paper tickets well into the 2010s, which weren't even consistent across modes of transport (destination specific "one way / return from x to y" single use tickets for trains, zoned "travel ten" tickets for buses, etc), and which often had to be paid for with exact change in coins (and which often couldn't be purchased in advance). Opal only soft launched in 2012, it wasn't actually available on all modes of transport, for all ticket types, etc, until end of 2014.
- CrispyKerosene 2y ago
  Not to mention the massive cost increase to those who previously bought yearly Zone 3 passes. I saw my transit costs increase overnight from $2200 per year to over $3500 with the introduction of Opal.

Spooky23 2y ago

My team supports an entity that had 3G infrastructure in the US. The carriers aggressively acted to move them to newer tech - including funding replacement modems and devices. I find it hard to fathom that this would be a surprise.

aryonoco 2y ago

In this particular case, that's the result of misconfiguration on the devices https://danielbowen.com/2024/11/09/myki-and-3g/ https://danielbowen.com/2024/11/09/myki-and-3g/ I have a certain amount of sympathy for Myki's operator in this case, this would have been a difficult edge case to test.

khuey 2y ago

That doesn't really surprise me. Here in San Francisco some of the city transit system's bus tracking equipment that they use for real time arrival predictions was still using 2G when the 2G network shut down in 2017. Then a different part of it was still using 3G when the 3G network shut down in 2022.

more-nitor 2y ago
idk what about temporarily shutting down 1/2~2 day(s) per week for 2 months right before fully shutting down? then we can know if something is affected by the full shutdown
- RicoElectrico 2y ago
  That's called brownouts and incidentally is what OSM operations team did when disabling OAuth 1. https://en.osm.town/@osm_tech/112518295046590442 https://en.osm.town/@osm_tech/112518295046590442
tiffanyh 2y ago
I was expecting you to say how SF train system is still run off floppy disks. https://www.wired.com/story/san-francisco-floppy-disks-muni-upgrade/#:~:text=The%20city's%20light%2Drail%20system,them%20won't%20come%20cheap.&text=The%20San%20Francisco%20Municipal%20Transportation,light%20rail%20off%20floppy%20disks https://www.wired.com/story/san-francisco-floppy-disks-muni-....
blendo 2y ago
Is that why all the “next arrival time” displays on SF’s bus stops stopped working several years ago?