There may be no launch fate for new transport ticketing system, but it continues to soak up public money

If there is one project, apart from the serious backlog in renewables, that shows that it is time for everyone, administrations and private companies, to get their act together again to modernise the country's infrastructures, it is T-Mobilitat. The mess in the management of this change, which should bring the ticketing system up to date with most European cities, using top-up cards or paying directly with a mobile phone, is incomprehensible. The first steps were taken ten years ago, in 2012, and it has been eight years since the temporary joint venture SOC Mobilitat (formed by CaixaBank, Indra, Fujitsu and Moventia) was created. This joint venture had to specify and implement a project promoted by public administrations, which after all are the ones that take on the main cost. It would take too long to list the many delays but it is only necessary to note (as is clear in a new legal report to justify the administration's motives for a new modification - the fourth - of the original contract) that right now the roll-out date is unknown, and there is no option of going back. On the contrary, the Metropolitan Transport Authority (ATM) has had to advance up to €14.5m to the joint venture – €10.6m have already been paid since last December – to provide liquidity and allow the work to be completed. The reason is that CaixaBank, the financial partner, threatened to pull out of the project last autumn. The reasons why it finally stayed part of it are not clear, but the fact is that it has now been the administration that has advanced the money.

It is clear that things have been done badly - the cost overrun is already almost double the €58m original budget - and for the moment there are no clear explanations either of the reasons nor of the responsibilities of each party. And in spite of everything, the urgency is to get the system up and running before it becomes obsolete again. The current operation with cardboard tickets with magnetic strips, typical of the 90s, is so outdated that there are no more companies that use it and it has to be the ATM itself that fixes things when they break down. All this at an annual cost of around €6m, which could have been saved if T-Mobilitat, as planned, were already in operation.

Here it seems that almost everything has failed, from the technological part to the political direction of the project. In this case the public-private cooperation has not worked well at all, to the point that all those involved blame each other in private, without publicly expressing the reasons for the disagreements. It is true that changing the entire transport ticketing system can be complicated, but in other cities it has been working smoothly for decades and there do not seem to have been these setbacks. The time will come to attribute responsibilities but, above all, what is needed now is an effective direction that gives the project clear and realistic deadlines. T-Mobilitat, which is now only being trialled in some areas, has to become a reality as soon as possible. And all efforts should now be focused on this objective.