It was exhibit K, uploaded Friday, noticed Monday: three hundred pages of the transit-tech contract the city spent two years declining to publish. By noon it had been downloaded thousands of times, and the debate changed shape overnight.

The headline terms: a nine-year agreement, performance payments tied to on-time rates rather than installation milestones, and — the clause everyone quotes — public dashboards for reliability data, updated daily.

What the numbers say

The pricing is lower than critics feared and higher than supporters claimed, which is usually where truth sets up camp. The penalties for missed reliability targets have real teeth; the bonuses for exceeding them are modest. Whoever negotiated it understood incentives.

Sunlight arrived by accident, but it is still sunlight.

What happens now

Officials promise a redacted official release within weeks — an odd pledge given the unredacted version now lives on a thousand hard drives. Watchdogs want the subcontractor terms next; the vendors want everyone to focus on the dashboards.

However it was published, the public finally gets to grade the overhaul against its own contract. That was the point all along.