Auditor: MBTA wasted money on CharlieCard project
By adamg - 2/24/09 - 3:49 pm
State Auditor Joe DeNucci's report says the T blew $15.4 million by dallying on implementation (the project was at least a year behind schedule) and another $2.9 million by not collecting the extra fares the new gates were supposed to bring in.
My favorite part: The T reduced the warranty period for the new card readers, and so had to pay $600,000 for repairs to readers that broke after the new warranty ran out but before the old one would have.
In its response (included in the report linked above), the T says half the cost was related to a change order to install "high panel gate barriers" that made it impossible for fare evaders to jump over or slither under the gates.
Comments
Guarantees in life: death,
Guarantees in life: death, taxes, MBTA wasting/mismanaging money.
And I guess this is one of the reasons Cadillac Duval want's me to pay an extra 19 cents per gallon of gas, to clean up yet another mess.
Ways to devalue a point, as illustrated above...
1) Anonymously posting
2) Using that sad "Cadillac Duval" (Deval, maybe?) nickname
3) Going off-topic to use an MBTA post to complain about the gas tax
On a related (to the post) note, I haven't seen any of these "high panel gate barriers." Does that refer to what's in place now, or is there something else coming which might actually prevent fare evasion?
High gates
are the wide gates that you find at some unattended entrances, such as at Central and Kendall Square. They are supposed to be high enough that it would be hard to climb over them.
"Impossible for fare evaders"
Why would fare evaders bother trying to jump over or slither under the gates when they could just walk through unabated as they do now? The T should have saved our money instead.
It's like a mind game, isn't
It's like a mind game, isn't it? How many ways can they screw us on purpose before we revolt?
I'd call this embarrassing
I'd call this embarrassing but not totally scathing. It feels bad because it's public money, but it doesn't sound like a uncommon amount of mismanagement and overrun for a IT-centric project of that scale, sadly.
It does sound like the T let S&B call a few too many shots, which is weird. But given the energy Cubic put into fighting the bid process, I suspect they would have called just as many had they been selected.
The T's response to the auditors' issues in the report seem pretty well taken apart by the auditors themselves. (They didn't think about fare-evasion-resistant gates in the initial design? Really? And, as noted, they seem to have missed the piggybacking problem entirely.)