I had been thinking that today I’d say goodbye to my unlimited free travel pass, and the state government PR machine would declare the current SmartRider trial a success. But then this arrived.

Thank you for your continued support in helping us implement SmartRider. The Control Group feedback we continue to receive has identified a number of issues that will delay the full implementation of the project. These include the “Invalid Wait for Stop” message that many passengers are getting … [and] some card transactions are giving incorrect commands when tagging on and off, which causes incorrect transactions to appear on your SmartRider account … [we're] working with the software developers to resolve these issues.

To allow time to fully implement fixes to these issues, the SmartRider Control Group trial will be extended until we are completely satisfied that the system is 100 percent reliable and can be rolled out to the wider community.

So it looks like I get free travel indefinitely! Even better, the plan for a full roll-out in April is probably going to be pushed back again, which by my count is the seventh delay for starting up the system. At this rate we may well be catching trains to Mandurah before we can tag on and off.

Although there’s lots of chatter about the system having major flaws, I expect that they’ll keep pushing to make it work; knowing the IT biz, the suppliers probably have the state government locked in with proprietary technology and a restrictive support contract. It’s actually been working quite well for me, although I’ve only just started using the (rather convoluted) online check-balance page because whoever processed my form typed my date of birth in wrongly (and the poor Transperth call centre lady was so apologetic that she couldn’t fix it while I was on the phone!).