MPTE Walrus Smart Card

[CX54 DKD (Moderator)]

RE: MPTE Walrus Smart Card
Tyne & Wear, Nexus, have a working system too for their Metro. With their system I can, and do, even load my monthly pass onto my university ID card thus reducing the number of cards I'm carrying around. In no way is it any sort of retrograde to using paper tickets, it's massively better and more convenient as a passenger so I completely refuse to take on board postings here suggesting otherwise. It's teething issues surrounding staff training, passenger usage and hardware without the necessary updates causing problems on Merseyside and it will be rectified. It'll be interesting to see how passenger opinion changes once current issues are ironed out; I significantly doubt many would still want to go back.

The cost to alter the Oyster system could have been comparable to or even more than Merseytravel developing a bespoke solution. Software engineering is not cheap and, believe it or not, the most expensive part of a development cycle is the ongoing support and modification of the system. If there's even a slight difference in the way the systems need to operate (and there will be, it's not just a database which connects to everything), it quickly becomes unfeasible to modify existing systems and cheaper to develop something new - whether that should be a joint project with other PTE's around the country is a different discussion). Let's not forget how quickly hardware and software become outdated as well and in addition, be aware that a system written in a now outdated or lowly adopted language is as good as worthless (cost implications, lack of programmers etc.) so there's just a few more reasons not just to adopt something which has been working elsewhere for a prolonged period.