The blame game

By : William Nichols

   The board game “Clue” rarely evokes as much finger pointing as the events that occurred in Warsaw last Monday. What was supposed to be the first day of a new ticketing system for Warsaw’s public transportation authority (ZTM) instead marked one of the biggest public blunders in recent memory. And no one is quick to accept the blame.

   Across the city, crowds of commuters gathered around kiosks Monday, the first day of the month, searching for public transport tickets that few vendors had. And those who did have the tickets were not rewarded for their wares.

   “It was horrible,” said Izabela Bonin, who sells tickets from a kiosk at Warszawa Centralna. By Monday afternoon she was already out of 30 and 90-day tickets, and the “sold out” sign she pasted on the window of her store did little to deter angry ticket searchers. “People were yelling at me and demanding to know why I didn’t have the tickets. I told them to call ZTM,” she said. “They (ZTM management) weren’t prepared. People had no idea that there was going to be a change in the system.”

   ZTM responded to the public outcry by sacking the man in charge of ticket distribution, Witold Łukaszewicz. But according to ZTM Spokeswoman Beata Bielawska, Łukaszewicz may be the convenient butler in this game of whodunnit – there are other culprits.

   She blames French firm Monetel, which won the right to implement the ticket transition at a staggering zł. 120 million ($28.5 million). By comparison, construction of the new Œwiętokrzyski Bridge was a mere snip at just zł. 100 million ($23.8 million).

   While long-term passes were available in only a few outlets Monday, short-term, single-journey tickets were also difficult to find – leaving many commuters ticketless. Monetel subcontracted the printing of the short-term passes to a company in Spain that failed to deliver them on time. And who does Monetel blame for the late arrival? Well, after the terrorist attack in the United States, the Spanish company decided to send the tickets by rail instead of air.

   But besides Monetel, the real problem, according to Bielawska, lies with the counterfeiters for whom the new tickets were designed to stop. New long-term, plastic tickets contain a computer chip that can be recharged when credits on the ticket are depleted.

   The short-term tickets have a magnetic strip that can be read by a computer. The result of the new technology is that the new tickets are now much more difficult to forge. Proof of that, Bielawska said, is in the extraordinary number of new tickets that have been sold this week, which has also contributed to the ticket shortfall.

   “Usually we sell around 550,000 long-term tickets each month,” Bielawska said. “This week we’ve already sold 750,000.”

   But no matter who takes the blame, the overall victims of the ticket folly are Warsaw’s long suffering commuters, who scurried across the city in search of tickets and stood in lines for up to three hours waiting to buy long-term passes.

   “It’s scandalous,” said one woman standing outside the ZTM headquarters on Tuesday. She left work early in anticipation of the time she’d have to wait for her 30-day pass. “ZTM has no respect for people and their time,” she said.