Sydney finally launching public transport smartcard - Opal card

[moa999]

Opal card | Transport for NSW

Opal Card -- An Introduction - YouTube

The Opal card will be introduced with a Customer Trial on 7 December 2012 for the Neutral Bay ferry service. It’s expected to be available for all Sydney ferry customers, from Parramatta to Manly, by the end of next year, with the roll-out to trains starting on the City Circle in the second half of 2013. The Opal card will then be introduced on buses after that.

Unlike Victoria, cards will be reloadable “pay as you go” stored value Opal Cards and non-reloadable Opal Cards.
Initially introduced with an incentive similar to Queensland - free trips after eight journeys during a week and daily caps. All other prices remain the same (for now)

 

[straitman]

View attachment 11203

Opal card | Transport for NSW

Opal Card -- An Introduction - YouTube

The Opal card will be introduced with a Customer Trial on 7 December 2012 for the Neutral Bay ferry service. It’s expected to be available for all Sydney ferry customers, from Parramatta to Manly, by the end of next year, with the roll-out to trains starting on the City Circle in the second half of 2013. The Opal card will then be introduced on buses after that.

Unlike Victoria, cards will be reloadable “pay as you go” stored value Opal Cards and non-reloadable Opal Cards.
Initially introduced with an incentive similar to Queensland - free trips after eight journeys during a week and daily caps. All other prices remain the same (for now)

I really hope they do a much better job of the introduction than Victoria.

...... They would be hard pressed to do worse :!:

 

[markis10]

I think the cards across Australia like this have had a difficult intro.

 

[samh004]

I look forward with baited breath.

 

[wingspan]

I think the cards across Australia like this have had a difficult intro.

Adelaide's has gone quite smoothly so far

 

[anat0l]

Let's hope this works better than the previous smart card experiment in Sydney that had the government and the smart card company virtually (and legally) winging each others' necks.

The go card has been broadly OK in Brisbane, save for the 15-20% fare rises each year which is starting to strain the economics. Fare evasion is always a problem with these smart card things; of course, only in good ol' dishonest Australia.

 

[bodog]

It's a joke - 10 years too late - and the world is now moving to NFC on mobiles
A political stunt and announcement - next they'll be announcing a train to the NorWest suburbs!

How long have other global metropolis's had smart card based systems

 

[anat0l]

How long have other global metropolis's had smart card based systems

Not to take the shine off the topic at hand, but coincidentally, from my hunch and check, all of Germany doesn't use any smart cards for the public transport system. It's all still paper tickets that need to be validated. Same thing in Austria and Switzerland.

With an open gate / honesty based system and a mere fare evasion fine starting at only EUR 40, you'd think that there'd be a whole lot more fare evasion. I know it would be if it were introduced in Australia.

But it's an excellent transport system.


I'll take an excellent transport system for a slightly inefficient ticketing system. (But I wouldn't mind the German ticketing system). Sydney, unfortunately, has neither.

 

[tim374]

I like the max $15 per day, down from the current MyMulti day pass of $21 - will make it cheaper to go to Sydney for the day. I only hope I will still be able to buy my yearly ticket between my local station and work, and "load" that on the card, as yearlies are the best value for my commute.

 

[mella2007]

Why it is so difficult for Australia to have a decent smart card system is beyond me.

 

[Mal]

Why it is so difficult for Australia to have a decent smart card system is beyond me.

Quite simply the people implementing them want the convoluted and strange existing fare scheme to be moved over. This makes it very difficult for a vendor to produce a replica smart card system.

Plus tendering etc gets stuck in the usual government procurement red tape.

I think the most successful one in Australia has been the card used in Perth... but afaik the fare scheme there wasn't overly complex.

Sent from my GT-I9100 using AustFreqFly

 

[moa999]

Sydney's existing system is very complex.
Train. - Single/ Returns, Off-Peak tickets, Weeklies, Monthlies, free transfer between lines, gate fee on airport station
Bus - Single, Travel10, No off-peak, no transfers, mix of public/ private operators
Ferry - Single, Travel10, No off-peak, fixed fares Taronga/Manly
Light rail - Single, Tens
Then sitting across all of them you have the Daily/Weekly MyMultis

Personally I hope that the rail system moves away from Return fares, and off-peak and some form of interchange ("journey" for the Brisbanites) is introduced.

Timetable has it being rolled out to parts of rail during mid-2013 so that is when it will start getting mass adoption.

 

[chrisb]

Why it is so difficult for Australia to have a decent smart card system is beyond me.

Perth's Smartrider system has been running since about 2007 and as far as i know there hasn't been any major issues. It works really well.

 

[SeaWolf]

Perth has a major advantage over Sydney though in that our fare system is dramatically simpler (just a set of zones, same as most major cities in the world). Sydney has the most convoluted fare system of any city I've ever encountered.

 

[oz_mark]

Perth has a major advantage over Sydney though in that our fare system is dramatically simpler (just a set of zones, same as most major cities in the world). Sydney has the most convoluted fare system of any city I've ever encountered.

Perths major advantage over the Melbourne project and the first Sydney project is that they didn't try to build their own system. As fas as I can determine, this latest go in Sydney is using a customisation of an existing vendor product.

As for the simplicity of the fare structure, Perth did eject some of the old options (monthly tickets etc). One thing it had going for it, was that it was never as expensive as Melbourne or Sydney, so they never came up with all sorts of product packaging to help people save a few dollars.

 

[anat0l]

Perth has a major advantage over Sydney though in that our fare system is dramatically simpler (just a set of zones, same as most major cities in the world). Sydney has the most convoluted fare system of any city I've ever encountered.

Transport for London's zone map can be a bit confusing, but more is that the zone to zone cost is accompanied by a bunch of exceptions (viz. this is the tube). Buses are fixed fare and require only one touch on.

Not as bad as Sydney, but I can't see how it will invariably be a huge risk to a smart card project. I'm sure the software engineers will need to think very smartly (pardon the pun) about what bare bones information will be packed onto the smart card itself in order to cope with the various systems, but will the convoluted fare system be the insurmountable barrier for the project? I'd like to think not.

As far as I have read (not deep), the previous failure - T-Card - was mainly due to software problems at the coal faces. I don't think a complicated fare system is the root of such a plethora of failures.

 

[SteveJohnson]

As far as I have read (not deep), the previous failure - T-Card - was mainly due to software problems at the coal faces. I don't think a complicated fare system is the root of such a plethora of failures.

That's what I recall as well, the actual trials of the machines on the buses were riddled with problems, it was the 'hard product' of the card and reader and software in the system.

Sydney's mish-mash of fare products didn't help at all, I think at the time I read an article saying there were over a hundred different fare products for bus train and ferry based on destination time and concessions, at least now this has been simplified to some extent but we still have a way to go.

The problem with the fare structure is that if you made it reflect reality the people in the suburbs would pay a lot more than those nearer the city, so those in the suburbs would kick up a massive fuss, and that could easily have political ramifications at the next election because those mortgage-belt suburbs are vital to any party wanting to win power.