Despite concerted efforts by planners and economists since 1999,...

Despite concerted efforts by planners and economists since 1999, key project decisions have been postponed repeatedly. Cabinet and Treasury have not found a way to conquer the issue of how commuters pay for the hugely varied trips they take on Sydney transport.

Policy advisers advocated fare reform as a crucial twin to electronic ticketing in order to make travel more convenient, reduce fare evasion, speed up buses through congested streets and make fares more equitable.

There are always winners and losers in a fare reform package. Cabinet has feared giving the bad news to the losers, and has shied from making important decisions.

Instead, struggling to meet even the most simple requirement and bleeding funds, ERG has continued to wrestle with the inordinately complex task of writing an electronic fare recovery system for 70 different types of tickets. It has also had to deal with a nervous transport bureaucracy and RailCorp's outright resistance to Tcard. As a result, it was decided to protect the rail network from controversy by insisting the smart card operate in parallel with the existing magnetic stripe regime.