PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — SEPTA is considering hiring a new vendor to run its troubled fare collection system.
The board on Thursday will vote on a new company to operate its beleaguered SEPTA Key fare card. The Key card, under current operator Conduent, of Florham Park, New Jersey, has been prone to glitches and millions in cost overruns since it was introduced in 2016.
SEPTA Board member Rob Fox said the current fare collection system is outdated.
“If you look at what’s happened to this antiquated system over the last year, it’s been significant,” Fox said during a meeting of the SEPTA Board’s Administration Committee. “We’ve had 30 outages of the system over the last year.”
Repeatedly last summer, system malfunctions prevented Key card holders from adding value to their cards.
“It’s like Windows 95 operating on it, right? I mean, we need to move on to something more contemporary,” said board member Dan Muroff.
The switch to a new vendor, Cubic Transportation Systems, of San Diego, would cost $211 million for the 12-year contract. Fox said it would be no more expensive per year than what SEPTA is currently paying.
“This is not new costs,” he added. “These are the same amount of costs to operate a state-of-the-art system than operating a system that is 15 years old that is not state of the art.”
Muroff asked how SEPTA could avoid the cost overruns that plagued the Key system. “I started off talking about sort of a collective PTSD, and not just at SEPTA but I think regionally — cost overruns with Key.”
Liz Smith, the transit agency’s chief of staff, replied that SEPTA anticipated that issue when seeking bidders.
“Those requirements being pulled together in this way up front means that what the vendor has bid on is what they have to deliver,” Smith said. She added that staying with the current system would have risks. “It’s going to become more and more expensive as time goes on to support it with a greater risk of that catastrophic failure, which leads us back to paper tickets and cash if the system goes down fully.”
Conduent, in a statement to KYW Newsradio, said it believed a move to a new fare collection vendor was unnecessary.
“As a global industry leader in fare collection, supporting transit authorities around the world, Conduent is proud to continue supporting SEPTA,” the statement reads. “Our team has been managing — and will continue to manage — the complex and critical work of expanding contactless payment options to all modes of transit. Our view is that SEPTA does not need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new system when SEPTA’s objectives could be achieved through feature enhancements. Features that SEPTA is seeking with Key 2.0 are either already operational in the current fare collection system or can be added in a cost-effective manner. In addition, we believe making a significant change at this time will likely lead to increased risk of delays, disruptions and costs that have not been accounted for.”