Sydney's Warning On Tcard
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday December 4, 2007
SYDNEY will not get its Tcard until 2017 if the State Government axes its smart card contractor now, the contractor itself says. The Perth company ERG Limited, which has been running late on the Tcard contract it won in 2003, has delivered its final bid to the NSW Government to continue with the project. Last month the Transport Minister, John Watkins, gave notice that the Government intended to terminate its contract with ERG unless the company could remedy the long delays. On Friday ERG executives handed several hundred pages of documents to the Public Transport Ticketing Corporation in a pitch that seeks to reassure the minister it can deliver on the Tcard project, with a public trial on the CityRail network under way by the middle of next year. "If the Government was to go to another contractor now, it would take years to go through the learning phase and requirement capture just to get to the trial stage, and full implementation would probably be a decade away," ERG's director of operations, Steve Gallagher, said. He said the full system would be in operation in 2009, but Elizabeth Zealand, the head of the corporation, questioned that date. "All the schedules are indicating to me that the full system completion is February 2010," she said. The corporation's board will meet on Friday to make a decision. And the Government's transport woes continued as a report showed overcrowding is a worsening problem for Sydney train travellers and passengers are deserting country services in droves. The Transport Reliability Report for 2006-07, released yesterday, shows 16 per cent of CityRail trains between 7am and 10am were overcrowded in March. Meanwhile patronage of CountryLink services had dropped 7 per cent, the fifth consecutive year of declines. Patronage has fallen more than 25 per cent since 2001. with AAP
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald
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