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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."
For the most part Oyster cards work extremely well. Two downtimes in several years isn't the worst thing ever considering the number of people with travelcards on their Oyster cards who are paying regardless of whether the system is up or down at a particular time.
Without Oyster the entire network would grind to a halt at peak hours due to added processing time (even to put a ticket through the tube gate machines, never mind queues and buying bus tickets instead of simply swiping).
There isn't any room to raise taxes right now, they've done it consistently over the past 11 years until people have very little spare cash. Anyway, Oyster works in London, which has the congestion charge for cars, so most people don't drive to work here if they don't have to. If they did they wouldn't ever get to work.
The only issue is the Oyster card hack, that took years to appear. But the track record is pretty impressive, so choosing them as the supplier seems quite a sensible solution to me. At least it wasn't one of the waste of time governmental contractors like EDS who just absorb public money in return for nothing or freedom-inhibiting systems.