How many times can one Myki gate break? I catch the train to work every day, and always carry a camera with me – so if a gate has a habit of breaking, then I’m going to catch it!
I’ll start the story at Flagstaff station when Myki gates were brand new – October 2012. Somehow they managed to all freeze up a few days later, with passengers having to touch on elsewhere.
On August 13, 2013 I found a single gate in need of reprogramming.
8 hours later it appeared the technician couldn’t fix it – the gate was blocked from use using a ‘DANGER’ flag normally used on broken escalators.
Jump forward to August 26, 2013 and the same gate was now physically broken, but station staff had some new Myki green ‘Temporary Unavailable’ flags to block the gate with.
A few uneventful months passed, until March 31, 2014 when somebody else managed to break the same barrier paddle.
The next morning somebody managed to break the second paddle.
A year then passed, until evening peak on April 29, 2014 when software faults rendered every gate dead in the water.
May 8, 2014 saw the ‘Temporarily Unavailable’ flags getting a work out yet again, when both sets of paddles got stuck in the gate.
Repairs got the gates working for about a month, until they failed again on Thursday July 3, 2014.
Not much happened over that weekend, because on Monday July 7 the ‘Temporarily Unavailable’ sign started to turn into ‘Permanently Unavailable’.
On July 8 I found a technician looking at the gate.
However that didn’t fix it – on July 9 half of the barrier paddle was stuck in the mechanism.
And by Friday July 11 things weren’t much better – the left paddle was flopping halfway out of the gate.
That is one full week for faults for one myki gate – how long until I find a longer streak of failure?
Footnote
Metcard gates were not immune to failure – over the years I did manage to find one where half of the paddle was stuck open. I’m guessing the Metcard gates were built of much sterner stuff!
Are those Myki gates the same mechanism used at some MTR stations in Hong Kong? Such as the one wide gate from your own photo here (https://www.flickr.com/photos/legoblock/5493515383/)
Melbourne’s myki gates were supplied by a company called Gunnebo:
https://railgallery.wongm.com/myki/E118_1675.jpg.html
They also supplied 516 flap gates for the KCR in Hong Kong:
http://www.railway-technology.com/contractors/station/gunnebo2/gunnebo21.html
Those gates appear to have been installed on the newer Ma On Shan and West Rail lines, as well as retrofitted to other MTR stations to permit wheelchair access.
Fascinating stuff. Thank you for the info! I don’t think one of those breakdowns you mentioned would be tolerated by passengers on the MTR, especially given the problems they have recently been running into. The only problem I’ve ever had with my Octopus card at one of those gates was around 2011 when I was on holiday in HK and the gate wouldn’t let me in for some reason and that was fixed very quickly by a friendly member of staff who told me to wait a few seconds and try again after resetting something on the computer terminal.
hi Marcus when I was at sunbury station all the 5 or 6 myki gates had x not an arrow I was very confused we payed a default fare
It’s a pain in the backside, but if you lodge a request, then you can get the incorrectly charged fare refunded:
http://wongm.com/2012/07/getting-myki-to-refund-incorrectly-charged-fares/
None that in the case of Sunbury, if you travel from zone 1 and don’t touch off, the default fare should be the same as the fare charged if you did touch off:
http://www.danielbowen.com/2012/03/27/myki-myths-2-touch-off/
[…] written about broken Myki gates before, but the other day I found an example of evolution in […]