https://www.thelirrtoday.com/2024/05/li ... -omny.html
This is a portion of the article:
"MONDAY, MAY 20, 2024
LIRR, Metro-North to abandon OMNY, grant no-bid contracts to upgrade existing systems
As the MTA's New Fare Payment System OMNY continues to struggle, with the implementation running years behind schedule, the MTA is putting a trio of resolutions before the MTA Board this week to abandon plans to expand OMNY to the LIRR and Metro-North, and instead grant no-bid contracts to Scheidt & Bachmann and Masabi to continue and upgrade the current legacy ticketing systems. This is the first update the MTA has provided on the status of the OMNY program in over a year, since they announced that they would be transitioning the program to MTA C&D management and would be "rebaslining" the schedule (which means the project was so far behind schedule, the only path forward was to throw the old schedule out and come up with a new one). With this new schedule showing the expansion of OMNY to the LIRR and Metro-North would not happen until 2027 at the earliest and at nearly twice the cost, the railroads are jumping ship.
These rather abrupt changes are a major setback to hopes for a better-coordinated regional fare payment system, and will make it more difficult for the LIRR and Metro-North to move away from its archaic ticket collection practices that drive up operating costs significantly.
The MTA branded its New Far Payment System as "OMNY" in 2019, which stands for "One Metro New York". The original intent behind the system scope and the name was that OMNY would become the One fare payment system for mass transit travel across all of Metro New York. But constant delays, mismanagement, and insularity on the part of the MTA has led OMNY to fail spectacularly on this front, with the region's fare payment infrastructure splintering into four distinct and incompatible fare payment systems, with many of the region's smaller operators left out altogether.
Now, not only is OMNY not going to be the One system for all transit services in Metro New York, it won't even be the One system for all of the MTA's services...
Instead, the MTA is seeking approval to grant no-bid contracts to existing vendors to continue and upgrade the existing ticketing systems used on the railroad. The MTA wants to grant Scheidt & Bachmann a no-bid contract valued at up to $134 million to replace the existing Ticket Vending Machines (TVM) and Ticket Office Machines (TOM) for both railroads, and another no-bid contract to Masabi valued at up to $97 million to continue and upgrade the current mobile ticketing system used by both railroads. In exchange, the MTA will take a $36 million credit from Cubic for the descoping of the railroad expansion—so at least at the moment, this move will cost MTA and New York taxpayers nearly $200 million in additional capital and operating costs.
With the railroads off the plate, MTA C&D says they will focus on completing the OMNY rollout on New York City Transit Subways and Buses, where they have struggled to add functionality over the last few years. MTA says "the ultimate goal is to ensure all NYCT customers and ridership classes are able to transition from MetroCard to OMNY by the end of 2024." In 2025, MTA expects to deploy an OMNY mobile application, rollout an OMNY virtual card (which the MTA previously abandoned but is now back in the mix), rollout of OMNY employee passes, and the expansion of OMNY to NICE Bus and Bee-Line in Westchester County, completing the implementation of OMNY on AirTrain JFK, with substantial completion for Subway and Bus scope expected in December 2025.
The MTA says that the OMNY back office systems are designed to be scalable to accommodate the railroads in the future, eventually allowing for transaction information to be consolidated onto one central back-office clearing house. But like other theories about implementing backend integrations between OMNY and other fare payment systems like NJT, Go CT, or TAPP, this will require a lot of complex work and I'll believe it when I see it."
[The article is much longer and has graphs and other illustrations - although I will put a portion of paragraph of which I agree why OMNY is a failure]
.......
"The MTA was the first agency to go whole-hog into adopting contactless payments first, instead of going with the tried-and-true method of implementing the closed-loop farecard and getting the new functionality down first, and then adding contactless features later. This has not only been the root cause of many of the problems facing the OMNY rollout on NYCT, but has made expanding it to other agencies—and, in particular, the railroads—where the fare structure is more complicated a lot more difficult. Years into the program, OMNY can still only support six different fare types, all of which are flat fares. ........
