beijing up and running

Positive news for a change and no ASX announcement on this, there's a surprise ;-) Good news about their Smart Card system posted on their website. If they can do this for Beijing, this must boost their case against the government for Sdyney, surely? From what I've heard, the London system is working ok too. Think I'll hold onto my shares, things will start to look up now hopefully.

Beijing: Up and Running
On the morning of 9 June, the Beijing Automated Fare Collection system went live with a public trial. Paper tickets were withdrawn from use at about 11.00pm on 8 June and the new smart card ticketing system went into operation early the following day. Over 300,000
passenger journeys were conducted within the first three hours of operation and approximately one million journeys were completed by the end of the first day. Beijing newspapers, including the Beijing Evening News, the Beijing Youth Daily and The First each reported the successful launch of the new system. This launch follows ERG successfully concluding customer-witnessed performance testing of the System at the end of May.

Most powerful in the world
The customer-witnessed tests produced excellent results in regard to the volume of transactions conducted within defined time periods. The internal stress test involved the
processing of 10 million journeys, including entries and exits for just over 4500 devices, and the running of End of Day processing in under 4 hours. The tests met the customer’s requirements, making the Beijing AFC Clearing House the most powerful of its type in the world.
Two weeks later a major integration test with the four AFC suppliers and eight metro lines successfully processed 500,000 ticket sales and 800,000 journeys in a 1 day test.
Steve Gallagher, Director of Operations for ERG, said, ‘This success represents a major milestone and
progress towards the successful introduction of the Clearing House and automated fare system into the
Beijing Metro ahead of the Olympic Games later this year.’
‘We believe the number of processed transactions makes this system one of the fastest and most comprehensive in the world’ added Frank Havelka, General Manager ERG Asia Pacific.