Sydney’s much-loved Opal card is set for a drastic shake-up as Transport for New South Wales prepares to put the contract for the iconic transit smartcard back to the market in coming months before the current deal with Transport for London and Cubic expires in just over a year, in September 2024.
NSW minister for transport Jo Haylen has flatly refused to say whether or not she was happy with the system to date, in a strong sign the new state government may well be preparing to draw a line under the popular ticketing system that helped define customer-centric service reform for the previous government.
In place now for around 14 years, the contract to deliver the Opal system of readers on trains, buses, ferries and soon possibly some point-to-point transport providers is expected to be put to the market over coming months, after initial soundings to industry were sent out by Transport for NSW over the past year.
While the Opal system has been a huge hit with the public since it replaced the archaic paper and magnetic strip ticket system in 2010, Labor now appears luke-warm on retaining the branding after three consecutive electoral terms in opposition being banged over the head with it as a reminder of the epic failure of Tcard, the junked billion-dollar upgrade that produced nothing but litigation after 15 years.
On Friday, Haylen officially launched the switching-on of Apple Express for Opal, an upgrade that lets people tap their iOS devices without first firing-up biometric identification like Face ID or Touch ID. It also uses a device’s reserved battery power so that people can tap or tickets be checked when phones have powered down.
Asked if she was broadly happy with the Transport for London (TfL) model that has been used here to date, Haylen told The Mandarin that “what I’m happy about is that all the passengers across the Sydney Trains, Ferries, Light Rail and Bus networks will now be able to tap on and off really easily with Apple Pay.”
“There are lots of things we need to do across how we pay for our journeys, how we improve our journeys, how we connect our journeys … As a new government we are getting on with the business of improving the passenger service because we are about the people who run our transport network and the people who need to use it,” Haylen said.
If that doesn’t sound like a ‘yes’, it’s because it isn’t. Asked again, Haylen deflected the question and moved on quickly. “I’m pretty unclear about what exactly you are after, mate,” a tetchy Haylen said.
More than 100 days after Labor was elected there are still clearly raw nerves over giving the previous government any credit whatsoever for Opal, possibly the least controversial rollout of a ticketing upgrade across Australia.
In typical Transport for NSW fashion, Apple Express has actually been quietly running on Opal for several weeks to test for teething issues before going to full public launch.
However, the entry of Apple into the transport ticketing space, especially Apple Wallet, presents some real challenges for the current make-up of the Pearl Consortium, which is the commercial vehicle used to deliver Opal services and infrastructure that include readers, networking and payments processing.
Opal is essentially a localised version of Transport for London’s (TfL) Oyster Card that has been licensed and rolled out here. The key members of Pearl are TfL, Cubic Transportation Systems and the Commonwealth Bank, which is the local proxy for Mastercard.
It’s no secret that Australian banks as well as global credit and debit card schemes like Mastercard and Visa regard Apple as a potent competitive threat to their cozy debit duopoly, and seamless transit gives consumers a real-life reason to choose Apple and Apple Pay.
This said, there are also rivers of bad blood in the relationship between NSW Labor and Cubic after the latter sued the government over losing out on the Tcard contract to Perth-based ERG, legal action that heavily dragged out delivery times, along with resistance from a white-collar faction of the Rail Tram and Bus Union within Railcorp.
(Bus drivers publicly supported both Tcard Opal because it meant they did not have to accept cash fares and thus were not robbery targets.)
The Sydney Morning Herald in 2010 revealed that former Labor treasurer Michael Egan lobbied the then soon-to-be despatched Labor government for Cubic prior to it securing the $1.2 billion contract for the new TCard build that went on to become Opal under the incoming Liberal government.
That contract followed years of litigation with local Perth-based transit and smartcard technology vendor ERG that essentially sent to company broke.
“In 2001, Cubic launched a court action against the government but the case exposed an improper relationship between its then managing director and a RailCorp employee alleged to have leaked tender secrets to Cubic,” the SMH wrote at the time.
“Ruling against Cubic in 2002, the NSW Supreme Court judge Michael Adams found it was ”guilty of reprehensible conduct” and had shown a ”lack of good faith and positive dishonesty” in the tender process,” the SMH investigation said.
Contract expiry time. Fun times ahead.
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