Mon 4 February 2008 - ‘Exhorbitant’ is spelt M-Y-K-I
If you thought $494 million was a lot to pay for the new “Myki” smartcard public transport ticketing system, hold onto your hats… today it was revealed the actual cost is more than double that — $1 billion dollars, no less. Somehow the government are now claiming they needed to add the operating costs, which they didn’t mention before now, and certainly not when they announced the deal.
Zowee. And I thought it was expensive before. Now it’s exhorbitant.
And all so we don’t have to physically insert our tickets into slots. (That’s the major, tangible benefit to users.)
Seriously, you could spend a tenth of that upgrading Metcard (including providing the contactless cards it was originally meant to have), pay for staff to come back onto the system at every station and on every tram, spend a bunch more on service upgrades (maybe even a major new rail line) and still have money left over.