It is just plain dumb for Toronto to go to a transit payment system that doesn't integrate with surrounding communities, especially when that system is being funded by the Province for rapid roll out.
It is even worse that a lame duck administration would do this.
And to award a major contract without tender (yes Torys is a very good firm -- I worked there and they are top notch) is outlandish.
No wonder people are angry:
http://www.thestar.com/mobile/NEWS/article/866255
The David Miller-era transit commissioners are poised to award $700,000 in legal work with the goal of acquiring a new open-payment electronic fare system before their term of office ends Nov. 30.
The nine city councillors on the TTC commission will meet next Thursday to confirm the hiring of Bay St. firm Torys LLP on a sole-source basis to develop a request for proposals for a new payment system.
Mayoral candidates are crying foul, saying the commissioners shouldn't be committing taxpayers to an expensive new system in the dying days of the 7-year-old Miller administration.
And they say the TTC shouldn't be going it alone when there's another system called Presto in the works.
"It's outrageous that the career politicians who run the TTC are trying to jam something through at the end of their term," said candidate Rocco Rossi. "This shows such disrespect for voters when we are less than a month to election day."
Because the TTC is pursing an "aggressive timeline" for a new fare system, there wasn't time to canvass a number of law firms, said TTC spokesperson Brad Ross.
5 comments:
I once like Rocco Rossi, but something changed with his campaign a few weeks ago. He had that god awful idea of an underground highway and those embarrassing television ads. What the hell changed with his campaign? He was running a good, high road campaign with steady upward movement then it went crazy and negative. Someone screwed up!
Politicians making business decisions = decisions that are self-serving & short-sighted..
But the Presto system was made by politicians, too, and it's a pretty crappy system. It's a late-1990s system being foisted on the city now, and it just isn't very good -
* There's a huge (few-hundred-million dollar) setup cost;
* It doesn't accept payments from payphones/debit/etc, meaning administering the sysem means you also have to act as a bank as well as a transit authority
* It can't work for its intended purpose - having people communte daily on (eg) Go trains from the burbs and then ride the TTC in the city. Literally can't - it can't handle more than 35 of those trips a month, which kind of sucks because a regular commuter will make 40+ (20ish round trips) a month.
Read that last point carefully; the Presto system "doesn't integrate with surrounding communities" for regular commuters either, because it is broken.
The system is already old-fasioned and broken as designed. The TTCs new fare system has to work flawlessly for 1.5 million passenger trips per day. Locking ourselves into some system which works ok for some suburban bus routes is just nuts.
And actually, I know nothing about procurement of legal services, so maybe someone could answer this for me -- is it really true that even the legal work of writing an RFP has to go out to tender rather than being "sole-source"? Who writes the RFP for writing the RFP? Does *that* work have to be tendered for? Are there RFPs for writing RFPs for RFPs?
I'm all for transparency and accountability in procurement, but cripes, no wonder it is so difficult to get anything done in government.
The worst thing about Rossi's tunnel idea in my view was how quickly some people wanted to shut down the thought of even debating its merits. It speaks to a mindset that we have in Toronto these days, that we don't even think of the possibility of considering out of the box ideas? If you ask me that is very telling and unfortunate and that's how a city continues the "status quo". By the unequivocal rejection for new thought process. Just my 2 cents.
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