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Comment by bigger_cheese | Hacker News Reader

I don't live in either city, I have family who live in both Melbourne and Sydney so I travel to each city relatively frequently at least a couple of times a year. My experience was Melbourne had their system years before Sydney had Opal cards.

I can distinctly remember first time using tap on/off card to get around Melbourne and thinking how much more convenient it was then needing to use Paper ticket machines Sydney had at the time.

Wikipedia lists 2008 adoption for Melb vs 2012 for Syd that seems to align with my memory. So might have just been curse of them being an early adopter.

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You're right on timing, but it wasn't that. The entire rollout was a clusterfuck. There are heaps of news articles from 2006-2008 about it.

Other countries had it before Melbourne and rolled it out smoothly. Hong Kong launched theirs in 1997. 11 years prior. Melbourne could have easily bought it off the shelf. Melbourne was not early by any measure

The issue with myki wasn't the card technology, it was the fact they wanted to have standardised ticketing across the entire state.

eg Tap on a bus, tram and train in Melbourne, get off in Wangaratta and tap on to a bus there.

There was going to be something like 29 zones, and all the requirements / edge cases / mucking around sent the cost through the roof.

What I'm trying to say is that it was mismanagement, which was well known at the time. Hong Kong also has Metro, trains (at the time), buses, trams, ferries. All from different companies. In Melbourne they are actually mostly under the same government agency.

The Hong Kong system's backend, and large parts of the frontend, was also written by an Australian company, ERG at the time, now VIX. So there was plenty of local skills that _could_ have been used.

That's interesting history! It goes to show what could have been if they asked around.

people in hong kong had cellphones before the year 2000

Brisbane had trials for a Cubic system in 2006 with a full rollout by 2008. It went, broadly speaking, OK. The machines at stations were a near unusable mess and the locations you could buy the cards from were ridiculously limited.

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