"Tom Barry" wrote in message
...
Boltar wrote:
Oh dear , some toys being chucked out of prams over at TfL HQ. Seems
poor old Peter Hendy was in a rage about the recent failures (read:
loss of revenue). Oh dear Peter , well now you know what its like for
Oyster to screw you out of your money through no fault of your own.
Suck it up mate.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7549603.stm

B2003

Have you got anything intelligent to say about it, or are you just airing
your well-known anti-Oyster views?

Personally, if Hendy is incandescent about the Oyster failures, good. He's
every right to be, indeed if he wasn't he'd not be doing his job properly.

As for the early end of the contract (in two years, actually) various
questions arise, not least of which is that Transys now have no particular
incentive to improve their performance beyond whatever penalty payments
are in the contract, a common drawback of outsourcing key functions. The
second question is how they structure the replacement. The third is how
this affects next years major roll out of PAYG on National Rail, which
will presumably require Transys and TfL to co-operate in order to do the
job properly, just at the point when EDS and Cubic will be looking to do
things like move the best staff to more profitable areas.

Which for me begs the question, what is it they are doing that couldn't
(shouldn't) be done by TFL anyway, and why should they be incentivised to
perform "better" (except in the sense that this is the, IMHO bogus, reason
for outsourcing in the first place).

Fare collecting would seem to be a core activity of a transport operator
that should be in house if the expertise is available, not some add on "nice
to have" that can be outsourced for a theoritical saving at the expense of
quality.

tim