The long march towards excellent public transport

Many of those who follow my Twitter account ask me if I have a gripe with Ruter# (sic), the public transport company in Oslo responsible for underground, bus, trams and ferries. I really don’t. Honestly! My issue is that, for other than cruising around the countryside in an English classic, I hate cars for everyday commuting. Cars are the bane of every modern city, and should be superseded by excellent public transport. And thus the problems start.Oslo’s public transport is in a dire state, when you look at its finances. 40% of every ticket is sponsored with subsidies, and yet we have one of the most expensive fares in Europe. 44 NOK (7,45 USD / 5,60 EUR)  As much as 50 NOK (8,52 USD / 6.50 EUR)  since the latest price hike (+13,6%) for a single ride within the city is outrageously expensive, even for Norway.

So what do we get in return for this amount? A very, very basic transport service ridden with flaws in various parts of the system. But also a troublesome mentality towards public transport. The feeling i get from riding the bus for ≈100 minutes every day on a route that is 9 km each way in walking distance and ≈36 minutes to drive, is that in Oslo you are not supposed to use public transport.

This is why when there is a fire incident in the underground and everything is halted for an afternoon, nobody cares that much. Most people shrug and flag down a taxi since the transport authority sponsor a taxi rides due to all the delays. Needless to say, sponsoring of taxis would not be necessary if the transport authority did their job in the first place. It’s a solution to a problem that should be absent.

Incredible as it may be, fires in the Oslo underground system was a very common occurrence a few years ago. With the arrival of new MX3000 trains, the same as in Vienna, the fires and smoke incidents became less frequent and happened only once every other month in 2010.

Compared to a vastly larger,  more heavily used underground system like the one in Hong Kong, a fire related incident directly connected to the operation is six times more frequent on the Oslo underground than the Hong Kong MTR for the time period of 2010. (Data gathered through news clippings)

Show me the money!

Let’s talk finances for a minute. I know that it is very pedestrian to gripe about how expensive things are in Norway, but Oslo ticket fares are stunningly high. Having done some quick, but not too dirty analysis of  various tickets in public transport systems around the world, I got the following result.

Basis for fare calculation; one single ride ticket, within city zones, except for: Tokyo, which is a full fare for all zones. Hong Kong is based on Hong Kong – University distance. Seoul is based on max starting fare + 5 km addition.

Some of the cities (like Moscow) are low-income, but it is truly amazing to see that the maximum single fare in Oslo is more than twice as expensive as comparable cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong and London. For all purposes, Oslo and Tokyo are more or less equally expensive (Oslo being slightly more expensive.  There are of course possibilities of getting rebated tickets, but Oslo doesn’t fare much better even when all rebates are factored in. And all the rebates in Oslo are subsidies, meaning the student fare is directly subsidized. It it not something the transport authority has to cover out of their own pocket.

In addition to the highest ticket prices in Europe, the municipality of Oslo subsidizes the transport authority to the tone of 1500 NOK (277 USD, 192 EUR) per person per year. Twice as much as the second largest town in Norway, Bergen. Compared to one of the Tokyo underground companies, the level of subsidy is extremely high, for Tokyo Metro, the subsidies is only 1.14 % compared to operating revenues. In Hong Kong, the MTR is generating income for its owner, the government. Granted, Hong Kong is a special case but it is at least possible.

The infamous Flexus Reisekortet

(Since I started this text, the disaster formerly known as Flexus has been re-branded to Reisekortet (The travel card), with less functionality and compatibility than the old one.)

A new ticketing system is the talk of the town in Oslo. Named Flexus Reisekortet, it was announced in 1996 to take over for the paper based ticketing system of the day. Flexus Reisekortet was to be an RFID based multi-use card system with a digital walled in addition to ticketing capability for the Oslo transport authority as well as the national railway system NSB. The technology is an NXP Mifare DESFire card, Thales back end (Oh, by the way, Thales also wrote the specification for the system. No wonder they fit so perfect for the job.), fare gates and POS systems with a right clusterfuck of a specification to combine it all.

Implementation of the system started in 2000 and is still ongoing 11 years later. There is still no end in sight for when the system, will be fully operational. Old ticket punch machines are still out thre, even though an angry bus driver thinks they’re all gone as a poor paying customer was told off the other day. Along the way huge concessions have been made in scope of the project:

• The project was intended to unite all ticket systems in the greater Oslo area into one card. This has now been abandoned to two cards, one for Oslo local traffic and one for national rail. Information is unclear as for the interoperability of the once united systems
• Internet top-up was announced to be available at launch, but is nowhere in sight in 2011.
• The digital wallet in the card has yet to be rolled out to every RFID card in the system, and it is unclear what cards are allowed to top up with digital cash to travel and how this is used.
• The fare gates are only installed on nine of 101 underground stations, and there are no fare gates outside the underground. This, in turn, enabled anyone to travel for free between stations without fare gates. Thus the manual, highly unpopular ticket inspections were to continue.
• The fare gate installation demanded a lot of reconstruction for many stations, but remain until this day unused as a way of insuring that only paying customers access the system.
• All RFID cards have a certain life span, and with launch delays the Flexus Reisekortet NXP cards went far beyond their life span. Did this prevent the transport authority from selling them? Nope. The Flexus Reisekortet cards had an extraordinary high failure rate. I have owned four cards, where three have failed. Christina is on her second or third bu she switched to Flexus Reisekortet just half a year ago. The transport authority admitted that the cards were old, but not to failure.
• Very bad public education on the usage and rules the system has led to hour-long queues at the only office in town capable of restoring credit to the cards. But, if you were so luck as to buy a national railway card, and load electronic tickets form the Oslo transport authority on them, and the card failed, well, you’re boned!
• Rules of usage were, and still are, very unclear. Since the fare gates mostly don’t work, it is fully possible to enter a payment zone without paying or verification. Many customers have been fined hundreds of dollars even after purchasing tickets since the rules for verification are unclear and sometimes undocumented.

So what is the status for the electronic ticketing system? Nobody seems to know, thanks to management skills somewhere between the abilities of the Swedish Chef and an Italian prime minister. So far, this attempt to start up an electronic ticketing system has cost Oslo the princely sum of:
600,000,000.00 NOK

(111,049,000.00 USD, 77,000,000.00 EUR)

But wait, there’s more! …money to be wasted.

The current iteration of an electronic ticket system is the third attempt to establish electronic ticketing  in Oslo. Plans for electronic tickets to pay fares have been on the board since 1982, when the transport authority first publicly disclosed plans for electronic ticketing. Let’s see how that went:

• 1982: First plans emerge to introduce electronic tickets with a magnetic strip for automated ticketing.
• 1991: The first attempt to introduce electronic ticketing is shown publicly. The machines were small, yellow and never got to sell anything more than paper tickets.
• 1997: Second project sued by vendors for failure to fulfill contractual obligations. Loss: Up to 157 MNOK (1997 value, current value 206 MNOK)
• 1998: Second project scrapped. Loss: 100 MNOK (1998 value, current value 128 MNOK)
• 2001: Third attempt introduced to the public. Time frame; up and running by 2005
• 2003: “Smart cards will soon arrive in the underground” announces Aftenposten, first fare gates appear.
• 2005: The only education of the public on new ticket systems were through articles in Aftenposten and VG, but no system was operating on anything even close to production scale.
• 2009: Oooops! Someone forgot to order ticket inspection machines for the ticket inspectors. Result, lots of angry inspectors and customers.
• 2011: Cost so far in third attempt: 600+ MNOK, and BTW many of those ticket inspection machines give false results since they «have no SIM cards in them».
• 2012: New front end to the system required, as the old NXP tech is obsolete. All validators to be change, all cards to be phased out. Loss: Unknown.

So when will this system be fully functional? At the moment it is somewhat working, meaning that a huge amount of the cards are difficult and sometimes impossible to validate on all validators, you can’t purchase tickets on line as promised in the spec, the zoning system was not implemented correct so you may get an “Invalid ticket” error even with valid ticket, and more. Do note that all these errors are on the front end. We know very little about what’s going on in the back office, where all the purchase transactions are taking place.