Plug pulled at last

The NSW government has managed to flush $64 million of our cash down the toilet thanks to the T-card project.

They'll blame ERG of course, and I think that is quite unfair. Sydney has an amazingly convoluted and disjointed public transport fare system. Instead of simplifying and harmonising the fare systems first, and then computerising them, some dick came up with the idea of using technology to mask the complexity. Someone should have told them that this never works.

I have a very good management textbook lurking around here somewhere. It was written back in the 1960's and it is called "Up the organisation". The author had been the CEO of a car rental company before writing the book, so he had a pretty good idea what he was on about. He was not some dry academic tool that had never set foot outside an ivory tower and gotten his hands dirty.

One chapter described the efforts of his company to computerise certain functions, and how to ensure that it doesn't go pear shaped. The idiots at the DoT should have spent ten bucks to buy a book that is nearly 40 years old. It might have saved us $64 million. You can computerise just about anything, but the more complex it is, the more it will cost to computerise it. A cheap system is a simple system - and a simple system tends to be a lot more robust than a complex one.

I could try and spend a few minutes explaining how the public transport fare structures are setup in Sydney, but I don't understand them myself. I think only a few very specialised people at Sydney Buses and CityRail understand how they work. When you have that kind of mess, no amount of computing power will solve it for you.