MTA’s $645M OMNY fare system hit with software bugs, missed deadlines, and high turnover: docs
A toxic stew of programming snafus, pivoting priorities and management turnover has derailed the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s $645M OMNY fare system, which is now years late and will cost another $130 million over budget, sources say and documents show.
As a result, the program’s promise of a single fare card linking the entire region together — allowing someone to buy a single ticket to go from Hoboken to Huntington, for example — has withered away amid the spiraling costs and delays.
“The first time you use it, it’s a miracle,” said one frustrated source. “To watch it fall behind schedule, it’s depressing.”
OMNY was originally supposed to cost $645 million but now has a $772 million price tag, which could grow more, officials acknowledged in April. Rollout on the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North was supposed to begin in 2021 — but now could be delayed until 2025 or later.
Another source was similarly despondent: “Of all the technology projects, it was one of the best,” describing the downsized ambitions as a “civic tragedy.”
The program has seen at least three leadership changes in the last two years, according to interviews with a half-dozen people familiar with the project.
Just a dozen or so MTA staffers are dedicated full time to building and managing OMNY, the agency’s next generation fare system, contributing to turnover and burnout, the sources added.
For comparison, that’s roughly the same number of employees the LIRR has used to staff a single train.
The MTA’s initial ambition can be seen in internal documents that illustrate how it planned to incorporate the logos of its commuter railroads and the Port Authority’s trans-Hudson PATH link into OMNY.
Half of that dream is now dead: The PATH is building a new separate system — using the same contractor the MTA is using for OMNY, Cubic Corporation.
The other half is much-delayed. The MTA recently approved spending $34 million to keep the LIRR and Metro-North’s current ticketing system in operation until at least 2026 because it has yet to finalize its designs for bringing OMNY to the railroads.
OMNY could potentially revolutionize ticketing on the railroads by the MTA to potentially install fare gates at major terminals like Grand Central and Penn Station and installing tap points on trains and at outlying stations, like how the New York City buses work. Such setups are common in Europe and commuter railroads in Boston, Philadelphia and New Jersey have begun to implement it, too.
The MTA’s blue ribbon fare-beating panel said the agency should examine fare gates as a longer-term strategy to reduce farebeating on the LIRR and Metro-North, which cost $44 million last year. However, switching over would likely face major union opposition as it would mean the hundreds of ticket takers employed by both railroads would either be retrained and reassigned, or made redundant.
A representative for the Metro-North unions referred OMNY-related questions to his counterparts at the LIRR unions, who did not respond to requests for comment.
MTA officials attempted to put a good face on the fiasco as they announced the latest overhaul of OMNY’s management in April.
“With OMNY, the MTA made a bold decision to leap ahead,” said MTA major project’s chief Jamie Torres-Springer, whose division will now directly oversee the fare system’s rollout.
It’s a shocking turn of fate for a program that initially got off to a roaring start.
The MTA and Cubic installed the tap receivers at every subway station and on every bus on time, before the end of 2020. Nowadays, the system processes more than 40 percent of the MTA’s bus and subway fares.
And officials have claimed a bit of momentum from their announcement that the MTA will this summer finally begin to install the long-awaited OMNY card dispensers after at least a year of delays.
But the MTA and Cubic have struggled to get the rest of the system up and running, sources say, because of the contractor’s glitchy computer code and the transit agency’s struggles to oversee the firm.
Take the OMNY app, which was once promised to launch by January 2021. In late 2022, officials said it likely wouldn’t premier until late 2023; in April, officials warned it could face more delays.
One key inflection point, sources told The Post, was a decision made in mid-2021 to add new capabilities to the already-complex and problem-plagued software that underlies OMNY.
Originally, the MTA planned to provide riders who qualified for reduced or free fares a dedicated card that had the discount programmed onto it directly — a simple solution that works a lot like the current MetroCard system, according to a 2019 memorandum.
The portion of the OMNY system that allows riders to directly tap-in for rides using with their cell phone, credit card or debit card would be reserved for those paying the full $2.75 to keep the computer system simple.
Officials feared attempting to build a system to match discounts to a straphanger’s device or bank card would become a programming nightmare, which could slow down development and would wait.
But, that decision was reversed amid leadership changes as OMNY’s original chief retired and ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers dueled over who would replace exiting MTA chairman Pat Foye.
“It took a really difficult technical question from the back of the line to the front of the line and it really gummed up the works,” said a source.
The first mention of the shift was buried on page 77 of a 139-page of a routine report provided to the MTA Board of Directors in June 2021.
Subsequent updates showed the decision contributed to the myriad of delays problems the program faced.
In January 2022, the OMNY team reported Cubic would miss its original September 2021 deadline to provide the required programming by seven months due to ongoing problems with “quality control.”
Cubic and its programmers missed the April deadline, too. The software it delivered in May 2022 was riddled with bugs that took another five months to iron out, according to a report provided to the MTA board that October.
“They promised a product that they couldn’t deliver,” said another source. “When they did deliver, they were years late.”
In statements, both the MTA and Cubic argued the decision did not contribute to the OMNY’s tardiness and budget overruns because the software was always supposed to have the function eventually.
Similar programming problems have also contributed to the delays getting the JFK AirTrain and the Roosevelt Island Tram onto OMNY, two other high-profile frustrations with the system.
Both are finally supposed to finally have tap-equipped turnstiles by November, officials say.
MTA officials defended the OMNY and their management of the project even as they acknowledged in a statement there may still be additional delays.
“[T]here is no question technology has changed since we started OMNY, and that is why the MTA is taking a fresh look at our delivery schedule so we can deliver all of OMNY’s potential to our millions of daily transit riders,” said Torres-Springer.
