The Very Un-fare Myki

David Heath
Tuesday, 27 May 2008 04:32

Your IT - Home IT

Myki's lateness now has the official stamp of approval.  Victorian State Public Transport Minster Lynne Kosky has finally stated the bleeding obvious – that it's late, will cost a lot more and that they're worried it might cost them the next election.

Myki is intended to be Victoria’s all-singing all-dancing smartcard-based public transport ticketing system.  This is a project which has two distinctly ‘interesting’ features.  Firstly, for the outlay of something like $AU 1B, we are going to replicate an existing system.  Secondly, it must be the only project suffering function creep – in reverse!  Every time it gets too big, they chop pieces off it.  It was due to be completed in 2007.
I'd like to start by correcting a couple of things I had wrong in my previous article on this topic.  Firstly, although everything I could find on the web indicated that Myki was based on the Mifare Classic smartcard, the security of which was well and truly destroyed with recent research, an apparent insider responded to my article saying that indeed the project was based on the Mifare DESfire card – one with a little more security.  Hopefully.  But other than that solitary feedback, I can still find no reference to the fact.  Silly me, I'd have thought the team in charge of the project would have been keen to correct such innacuracies.

Secondly, I clearly said it was dead; that they were (as I said) just waiting for the medical examiner to 'pronounce.'  Well, it's amazing how an injection of $216M worth of adrenalin straight to the heart can make a corpse sit bolt upright on the coroner's slab!

So, in the light of today's announcement, where are we now?    A project that should already have been completed, handed over to the people and ingrained in the travelling public's psyche has just received a 5-year extension.  “That's taking a cautious approach and I believe its an appropriate approach,” said Ms Kosky.  Well gosh, I'm glad she wasn't cavalier about it and extended the project for another ten years!

Just about every commentator pointed to the fact that 2010, the new intended delivery year was (oddly enough) a Victorian state government election year.  And strangely-enough the funding for the old Metcard system was extended to 2012 to make sure that the old system was still running sweetly during the election (and the new one didn't cause any election 'ripples!').

Readers, you won't be at all surprised to know I plan on creating 'ripples.'