ouch - this is gonna be painful, page-7

The Sydney project wasn't a "simple" ticketing system, the NSW fare structure is very complicated, with many different travel zones and as fast as ERG were coming up with a workable system, the government kept changing their requirements. A very frustrating time for those engineers employed on the project.

The smart card system that ERG producted for Beijing was a huge success - everything ran smoothly for the Olympics and it was completed well on time. There was much said about it in the Chinese media yet very little here. The herald can't wait to report when everything goes wrong, yet an important milestone like this went largely unnoticed.