Meet the Myki card, a brand new smart card, the backbone of the high-tech public transport ticketing system in Melbourne. Or not.
If you’re a sensible consumer, you will stay away from it as long as possible.
When the Matkakortti system in Helsinki started operations some years back, it had its share of teething problems – like terrible selection of a proprietary, soon-to-be-bankrupted vendor, incomprehensible user interface and so on. Since then, many cities have deployed smart card-based public transit ticketing systems – while some have been less successful than others, you’d have thought that these learnings would have been put to good use when building the Melbourne system.
Apparently not. Myki launched at the beginning of this year and suffers from not only huge cost overruns, missed deadlines after another, incomplete coverage (only trains so far) and equipment that doesn’t work well but also from a number of usability and other problems. I just started using Myki like 48 hours ago, and here’s what I’ve already discovered:
- They broke the one of the most important rules when replacing ticketing systems; speed. Myki readers – when they work – are slower to use than the old MetCard readers. Not by much, but by a noticeable amount. When millions of people need to move through gates, every fraction of a second counts.
- The train stations are not equipped with Myki recharging equipment. Imagine my surprise as I walk to our “premium” station one morning and naively assume I can top up my Myki card there. No such luck; not at the counter, not at the machines. Instead I would need to travel to the city to top it up – but wait, I can’t without a ticket so I’m forced to buy an old ticket to get to somewhere where I can recharge the new ticket. Not exactly a great start.
- At my stop in the city, the busy Parliament station, I find that the North end of the station also suffers from what I now understand is ubiquitous lack of Myki machines. So I have to walk like two kilometers to the South end of the station, where there is a Myki-capable machine. Someone is there to help me recharge and the customer service rep tells me that yes, the plan indeed is to be able to recharge everywhere where you can now buy MetCards, the old system. When I ask “When will that be? In 2020?” she gives me a nervous laugh and explains that they have for months been trying to tell the company they need a machine on the North side of the station but they have been unable to deliver. Good grief, what are they made of, some precious metal that is in short supply globally?
- Oh but wait! I can top up my Myki over the phone or online! Now that should be a breeze, right? Wrong. It can take up to 48 hours for the online topup to happen! Oh FFS, I can get an ice cream from SYDNEY by CAR faster than Myki can deliver a few bits between a couple of always-connected systems?!
I also discovered another problem – which Myki cannot be blamed for – that will be increasingly annoying as more cards go wireless; they interfere with each other. I can have a contactless payment card on one side of the wallet and a Myki on the other one, but try putting a third one in the same wallet and you’re asking for problems.
Myki is truly dreadful. However, my main problem with Myki is not that it doesn’t work very well, but that the transport operator is telling everyone that it’s ready, it works and that they should also be using it. If they had just launched it as “beta” or acknowledged that there were some teething issues, then I’d be able to tolerate it. So, instead of building a group of interested early-adopters, they’ve generated a group of highly irritated mass-market consumers.
True, by better handling the public relations they could’ve avoided much of the aggravation. My expectations were already greatly reduced by earlier media coverage and experiences, but I wasn’t expecting really basic stuff to be _this_ bad months after being “ready”.
If they wanted loads of eager beta testers, they could have billed it as experimental public beta with all tickets sold at 25% off.
But I suppose getting it to work last year was some sort of an election promise, so of course it works perfectly because politicians never… break… their… promises.. umm.. right. ;P
In Brissy the system worked fine. It was as easy to use as it is now in Helsinki. Just show your card, recharge at every station etc. I have no complains! Don’t know when they started it though, works in citycat, train and bus.
But yes you had to keep you card away from other cards or they might ‘interfere’ each other, but that’s the same here in Finland. Better to keep them in separate pockets LOL