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London's Oystercard Gets New Contract, But Same Suppliers
nk497 writes "Over the summer, the London travelcard ticketing system — called Oyster — fell over twice, forcing the transport authority to offer free travel to the six million Londoners using the system. After that, it cut its contract with the supplier of the system, a consortium called TranSys. But now, Transport for London has signed a new contract to replace the TranSys one — with the same two companies that made up the TranSys consortium. Sure, that should fix everything."
When you get the weather forecast, since you don't know the meteorologist's job it will seem like he is incompetent when you get rained on in what is supposed to be a sunny day. Your expectations of their abilities clouds your understanding of what can really happen.
The same things happen in the IT world. When those in charge have clouded vision (some even wear bloody blindfolds) they will have no useful understanding of how to manage an IT project. I believe that in the London area this is not the first demonstration that government types are fairly blind to how to successfully complete a major IT project. In fact, there have been so many stories of such blindness from London that it makes one wonder how they planned to use IT to manage all those cameras.
Anyway, when you only know two companies that want to do the job... whose CEOs happen to drink in the same club that you do..... errr well, a change in name should be good enough. After all, it worked for those blokes who make voting machines in America. Right!
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So the Transport organization formed a new contract with the same parties that failed them before. HOWEVER, the new contract is much more robust, with many more protections for the transport authority, and many more penalties for the provider if and when they fail.
So what exactly wrong with this? That someone who screwed up got a new contract?
Let me say that there are very few organizations that have the ability to deliver ANY service in this area. Having a contractor with a track record and some history of failure doesn't mean that the contractor aren't the best choice for the job.
Is this corruption or stupidity? Likely not. This is simple business.
Well, with a server-side solution, you just have to make sure that every turnstile can call a central server and process a transaction in less than 200ms. This includes the turnstiles in buses and in remote locations...
Truth is, every transportation system with more than a few fixed turnstile stores the rights of the user locally, in the smartcard chip. Of course, transactions logs are analysed every night and it is usually possible to detect incoherences between the values stored in the card and the reference value stored in the server. In that case, the ID of the misbehaving card is placed on a "hot list" and the card cannot be used anymore.
Of course, this works only if you use real cryptographic algorithms (like 3DES or AES) to protect the content of the card instead of relying on a vendor's snake oil.
Nobox: Only simple products.
You have a system in London that supports 4.5 million riders a day, in a city of 7.3 million. That's nearly 2/3 of the population.
Here in America, most of our major metropolitan areas have abortive mass transit systems that support closer to 1/10th of their population. Diesel buses are the workhorses of our transit systems and carry the vast majority of our transit commuters. Most are standing-room-only, thanks to the gas prices of the past few years and infrequent service. Most of our metro areas are just now starting to build small light-rail transit lines to supplement the bus service.
Be thankful you don't live in the Atlanta or Phoenix areas. At least you can get to "some back of beyond town" on your system. On ours, you're lucky if it's even theoretically possible to do a weekday commute.
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
I would have to agree that the Oyster card has all-in-all been a success. I used to live in London in the late 90's and at peak times you would have 20-person queues at each barrier-gate as the millions of people who use the "tube" daily tried to insert their paper card in the the narrow slit.
Using the tube on recent holiday to the U.K. I noticed things certainly seemed to go smoother with the majority of people swiping a card above a sensor at much greater speed than previously.
This is an example of technology making things easier and more efficient for the end-user. Exactly what technology should do.