New York’s MTA Says OMNY Rollout Falls Further Behind Schedule; Cites Poor Vendor Quality Control, Other Issues

Officials with New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority this week said the rollout of its OMNY fare-collection system has fallen further behind schedule and isn’t expected to see “substantial completion” until the fourth quarter of 2025–nearly two and a half years later than Cubic Transportation Systems, the system integrator on the project, had originally promised.

The project also is more than $100 million over the original program implementation budget of $645 million. Officials, in part, have attributed the delays to an aggressive original rollout schedule by Cubic. But they have also blamed the vendor for quality control issues with the project software, which they say remains a problem.

“(The) quality control process needs continuous improvement to meet timely project deliverables, such as reliable functioning software to provide the best possible customer experience,” said Joseph Devito, program director for McKissack, MTA’s independent engineering consultant, speaking Monday during the agency’s monthly board committee meeting.

MTA officials said in a new report updating OMNY’s progress that the account-based ticketing system has fallen about 29 months behind the original date for substantial completion. As of this week, the agency had spent 49% of OMNY’s implementation budget, now projected to run to $772 million.  

Popular with Riders
The OMNY system is replacing MTA’s nearly 30-year-old mag-stripe MetroCard almost entirely with open-loop payments. The new service has proved especially popular with New York City Subway riders, who are tapping with NFC devices and contactless credit and debit cards for nearly 40% of rides.

Overall, adoption of OMNY has topped one-third of total rides on the subway and city’s buses combined, with MTA recording more than half a billion taps since the launch in mid-2019. Riders make two-thirds of their open-loop taps with NFC-enabled smartphones and smartwatches supporting Apple Pay, Google Wallet and similar services.

The first two phases of the project–implementing OMNY on the giant New York City Subway and on board the buses, were completed on schedule, Devito noted. That included deploying 15,000 new validators at 472 subway stations and on board nearly 6,000 buses in New York City by the end of 2020, despite the pandemic.

Cubic also successfully enabled MTA to introduce an OMNY closed-loop card based on white-label EMV technology in October 2021. Because of the global chip shortage, MTA was not promoting the card much until recently, and MTA has issued only a little more than 36,000 OMNY cards to date. These are available for purchase at 4,600 retail locations in the city, mainly through the InComm Payments network.

The vendor also enabled weekly fare-capping on time in February of this year, MTA said.

Stumbles in Later Phases
But Cubic, which won the OMNY contract in November 2017, appears to have stumbled on features in the later phases of the project. That includes implementing OMNY ticketing on MTA’s two commuter operators, the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad; configuring vending machines to sell single-ride OMNY tickets; putting in place a full OMNY revenue system and introducing an OMNY mobile app.

Amy Linden, acting head of fare payments at MTA, acknowledged at a board meeting in January 2022, that the requirements for OMNY ticketing by the commuter railways were “rushed,” and as of January had only been completed recently. This resulted in a change order request by Cubic, which the MTA has not yet approved.

She said at the time that the change order could increase the total OMNY budget to more than $772 million. But Devito this week indicated that this and other change orders could be paid for out of contingency funds in the budget. McKissack in its most recent review of OMNY for MTA did not raise the projected budget above $772 million.

‘We Laid into Them Pretty Hard’
Janno Lieber, MTA’s chairman and CEO, also speaking at the January 2022 board committee meeting, said he and a couple of other MTA executives had held a conference call with Cubic’s new leadership to discuss the software issues.

“And I would say, colloquially, we laid into them pretty hard for some of the issues with their software releases that have been–you know, I’m gonna get outside my technical expertise–but there were specific problems with the most recent software release,” he said.

“And we have had a very detailed conversation with them to try to make sure that that doesn’t happen again. And they gave us assurances. We’ll see how it pans out.”

Yet, software for the much-touted launch Monday of reduced-fare discounts tied to open-loop OMNY payments for seniors and disabled persons had software problems. MTA said software delivered for the feature in May of this year required “several patches to debug” and retesting. It’s not clear whether Cubic or one of its subcontractor or partner companies provided the software.

The feature does not check eligibility of customers for the concessionary discounts. That has already been done since each customer must possess a special mag-stripe MetroCard that supports the discounts. The new feature merely links the numbers of these discount MetroCards along with the number of the credit or debit card the customer wants to use, on the back office. The feature works with tokenized cards in NFC wallets, as well.

It allows customers to use their bank cards or NFC devices to tap to receive the discounts rather than the MetroCard. Before the MetroCard is retired, by 2024, there will be a system for customers to verify their eligibility for concessions without using the MetroCard.

Software to replace the Access-a-Ride MetroCard for paratransit riders with an OMNY version also required several patches, said MTA. The fixes are expected to be completed by next month to support a pilot.

MTA’s Linden, during her presentation Monday showed an updated list of risk factors that she said the agency needs to monitor and try to mitigate. Topping the list was a risk that “vendor quality control is still lacking in several areas.” To help reduce that risk, MTA said it got Cubic to start a performance testing lab and agree to build a production-testing lab, the “first of its kind for transit worldwide,” she said.

And MTA added new risk to the list, this one citing “insufficient vendor resourcing,” Linden said.

“We concluded, based on more recent experiences, that as we continue to add features and complexity to the OMNY system, the vendor resources to support both the continued design-build and the operation of the system need to be scaled up accordingly.”

A Cubic spokespersons did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Mobility Payments.

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