Common Ticketing System?

When the LRTs, Komuter and Monorail were being constructed, the operators promised that tickets would be issued using automatic Ticket Vending Machines.

Fair enough. They were installed, but not enough were installed, and they were in typical Malaysian fashion always rosak.

Either it was plain rosak, or it'd eat up our money, or it was coins only.

Rapid KL (and what was then Putra) started issuing manual tickets. You know, like those issued during our primary school Hari Kantin?

Wow, we supposedly had a a first world, Wawasan 2020 world's driverless automatic light rail whatchamacallit, and we had erm.. a third world ticketing system, ala Syarikat Kenderaan Sri Jaya.

So among the many questions I would like to pose to the authorities and many transport operators, not exclusively Rapid KL:

1. Where is this supposed "common ticketing system" that you all have been talking about for years?
2. In the 1990s, had you all even considered the idea of a "common ticketing system" before you bought your ticketing systems?
3. Why are your ticket vending machines so rubbish, so much so that they are always out of order or do not accept notes?
4. What about your alternative ticket systems? Like the manual tickets - how sure are you that passengers are not evading full fare with these?
5. How long are you expecting to let this pathetic system remain?
6. What are your plans then?

This is why I feel so strongly against this mess in the ticketing process:

1. Passengers waste plenty of time queing up for tickets. Especially when they have to repeat the process when they switch to another line.
   
2. Valuable manpower assigned to issue tickets could be better utilised on platforms to manage passenger traffic.
3. It is costly to handle cash, especiall coins. You have to employ armoured vehicles ala Securicor to move them around and banks hate doing coins and small change. Anyway, banks have better things to do than doing coins and small change.
4. It is so easy to evade fare under the current system.
5. An opportunity to collect passenger travel information has been lost.

Actually, there are ways around this actually.

There are day and monthly passes issued by Rapid KL. But it is not systemwide. And it doesn't address all of the concerns mentioned above.

There is also the Touch n Go. Come to think of it, Touch n Go, being electronic, contactless and has the potential to be used in an multi-application environment appears to be a way out of this mess.

But why how many people actually use Touch n Go for their public transport needs?

This, I will discuss in the next post.