London is pretty amazing for public transport as well by British standards. I took up cycling when the office moved because my new bus route was just under £6 to go about six miles, which took an hour each way according to the timetable but in reality the first bus would be 30-40 minutes late in the morning if it bothered to turn up at all, and it only came every hour and a half.
It's still crazy expensive. An annual ticket for zone 1-5 costs 2500 pounds. For that price you get two annual adult tickets for all of public transport in Austria or 80% of a ticket for all of Switzerland.
I agree; that's insanely expensive especially given the cost of living in other aspects compared to Switzerland.
To add, this GA/AG pass in Switzerland includes essentially all travel except for a few funiculars, gondolas, and other specialized modes for leisure purposes. That means virtually every train in the country with the densest railway network outside of city-states as well as local transit (buses, local trains, ferries, etc.) is included.
Granted, Switzerland isn't a large country, but its public transit coverage is overrepresented, making it seem like a far better deal than this annual London zone pass.
I agree, having lived in both the UK and Switzerland. If you can justify the cost, the GA in Switzerland is incredible and works for most trains, buses and boats in the country (the exceptions are usually private touristy rail routes that go up mountains). People can and do commute from Geneva to Zurich in a day and have mobile data the whole way.
Outside of London, UK public transport varies greatly in quality and all of it is very expensive and overpriced. UK season tickets for lines outside of London typically involve a fixed route on one operator and usually only support commuting: one there and back journey 5 days per week max. By contrast, the GA in Switzerland really is unlimited. It will work equally well for boats crossing the lake in Geneva as it will for the local trams in Zürich and the train to get you between them, even if you travel on a Sunday. It doesn't matter if you present it to cantonal transport people, or private train operators, it will work, no arguments. Pretty much the only people not part of the GA scheme are tourist train routes up mountains, and to be honest, that's fair enough - staff to the facilities on the top likely get a free ride up anyway and nobody else needs to commute to the top of the Jungfrau.
I remember London public transportation used to be shit and expensive. Disregarding his later downfall, Ken Levingstone did a tremendous job during his tenure as mayor, with Oyster card, introducing the congestion (which subsidises TfL) and convincing the train companies to jump in the scheme as well.
If I remember correctly, one of the reasons public transportation outside london is so poor in comparison is that councils outside London are not allowed to subsidise it the same way London is. They are also forced to use private operators.
The inflation calculator of the BoE says that the average inflation between 2003 and 2020 was 2.9% per year, which means that £1 in 2003 was £1.62 in 2020. So the price you mention is not bad.
But it's £1.55 for up to an hour of new bus journeys in the system. So this means you can reasonably take two (or more) buses if that's a sensible way to make your journey rather than considering that each is priced separately so you should try to choose only the single longest bus journey for your trip.
You can do this with the tube, although it's less often necessary, e.g. suppose you're at Barbican and you live in Amersham. It might happen that your tube from Barbican turns into a Fast to Amersham and that's actually a reasonable way to get home. But much more likely you should disembark at Baker Street, leave the station, walk a few minutes to Marylebone, tap back in and board a mainline train to Amersham, since that's actually the same exact system and counts as a single Oyster journey between Barbican and Amersham.
One hour or five minutes, it doesn't matter, because either way, for commuters it's 2x1.55gbp, or twice as much as before. If the average paycheck hasn't gone up by that much in this time, it's more expensive for the user.
Well.. it just depends, are you marking to inflation, or to salaries? If you say those are out of sync, then you can't really be surprised when something else looks in line (or closer) with one but not the other.
I'm surprised fares are even increasing. No taxes to support transit? In LA County only like 5% of revenue came from the farebox so they are making buses and trains free for students and low income people. The rest comes from sales taxes within the county and federal and state funding.
You can see how they’re funded on their website[0]. I don’t think the city has the power to tax locally in the way LA might and funding London public transport out of general tax money would never go down well politically.
The county didn't have the power either to do it themselves, it ended up being the voters who approved the additional sales tax (iirc another 1%) at the ballot box. We are probably comparing apples and oranges though, too many differences in government.
In Sheffield in the early `80s, the then-radical David Blunkett instituted a "transport for all" policy which made most bus journeys 5p (at a time when a pint of beer was 50p). As it was no longer economic to have people collecting fares, they had a machine whereby you dropped coins into a hopper, and it printed out a ticket which was a copy of the coins, vertically (carbon-paper style). Students in the city would regularly put a handfull of pennies into the hopper and get a 4-5 foot ticket which they used to decorate their digs.
While I think it's clear that some of the currently Oyster-only features could be migrated (e.g., you can have a rail discount card on an Oyster card, but clearly it merely requires a way to link an Oyster card to the "account" of the contactless card), others are more challenging, like free travel passes.
I suppose you could just issue EMV-compatible cards where you grant the holder free travel, though I'd expect this would be more complicated than the status-quo (both in terms of needing to register IDs in lists that aren't particularly long currently, and in terms of needing a much larger standard implemented).
The standard exists for this - it's called "Model 3" and is an implementation of Account Based Ticketing.
Essentially your card becomes a reference to an online account. When you tap your EMV card, it uses it as a reference to find your online account and see if you have any travel passes associated with it.
There is talk of introducing it on the London Underground. The system already allows customers to associate a card with an account online to track their journey history. But nothing seems to have moved on much in the last few years.
> This has led to a growing colony of Oyster cards that haven't been used for at least a year - about 82m of them - and passengers' cash in the coffers of Transport for London (TfL) totalling more than £550m.
I would assume that TfL is investing that static £550m. Even at a 1% gain annually, that's a nice chunk of profit from sitting on Oyster cash
I don’t know how many people know this, but the balances on Oyster cards are refundable[0], so it is possible that they would indeed need to pay it out.
Sort of. Before February 2020, most (but not all) Oyster cards had a £5 deposit. However, Oyster cards issued since then do not have a deposit (there is instead a £5 fee for the card).
For older Oyster cards that have a deposit, you can still reclaim that £5.
Oh interesting, thanks for the correction. Will be interesting to see if I start to notice them when I (and people who might drop them) are out more.
The fee/deposit payment is part of it (prevention, it not seeming a disposable item) but with a deposit (there's no good way to say this..) there's also the incentive for the homeless or otherwise desperate to clear them up, since there's some guaranteed value. (Which could be a bit less than £5 due to negative get-me-home-at-night balance, but I don't think it's allowed to go as far as -£5, so a card with a deposit on it is always an asset.)
Even so, the proportion of refunds paid because someone requested one, vs. the number of cards that were lost/destroyed in the laundry/fell through the cracks means that they could keep some fractional amount on hand for those potential payments, and transfer the rest as "found money" to an operating account.
Despite the local critisicms, the tech implementation at TFL is really good. Oystercard was early, it's the same tech as all of public transport in the Netherlands (which started later but covers the whole country), but TFL quickly implemented support for all contactless bank cards while the Netherlands still in 2021 doesn't have that.
When I was living in the UK I only had an oystercard to lend it to friends and family visiting. Used Apple pay or my creditcard for all of my own travel.
I'm far from an expert, but the OV-chipkaart was implemented 15 years ago. At the time 3G connectivity on buses and trams couldn't always be guaranteed, and the tech in the readers was also limited. To me it seems that executing all transactions on the card itself and balancing the books later makes sense given these limitations.
(That's not to say I don't have any criticisms on the system - I think the entire 'omchecken' procedure when switching between train companies could have been avoided and doesn't benefit passengers at all, and the system also doesn't allow for a fare cap at the day/week/month ticket level like Oyster.)
I think GP is referring to the fact that the system used (uses?) NFC chips with very weak encryption, even for the time. https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/ov-chip-card/
That was certainly a mistake, but those were replaced by cards with more secure chips in 2011 [1] - I think it's hardly fair to write off the entire system as 'outdated at launch' because of one (admittedly high-profile) security flaw.
I disagree, here in Vancouver our system is also from Cubic and it is terrible. Our transit corporation, Translink, had to switch all the buses to a single zone fare because they couldn't get the system to work over the cellular network. Not to mention that the cost to run the system every year is more than the total fare evasion on the entire system before it was implemented. So revenue is lower on that part of the system and they aren't saving any money. At rapid transit stations, the fare gates are not reliable and extremely slow.
It is shocking how much better the much older MTR system is in Hong Kong in comparison.
> I disagree, here in Vancouver our system is also from Cubic and it is terrible.
Okay, but you disagree based on a different system. I’m not sure what’s the disagreement about, GP was expressing their opinion about Oyster vs OV. Regardless, when I was working in London and areas from 2008 to 2012, I loved it. Used it on every form of transport and topped up everywhere, simple swipe and done.
OV card is also very nice. Swipe while getting on / off and done. The Oyster system felt a little bit more convenient with regards to the reader placement but OV is okay.
It’s been a few years so my figures are likely a bit off but you can get a student Oyster card (which gets you something like 30% off all journeys) and then you can link it with your 18-25 rail card and get a further 30% off the tube during off peak times. It all adds up to a huge saving.
Student discounts is a big one, school kids pensioners and veterans can travel free.
Tourism is another; foreign cards can often work but it depends on the issuing bank and is subject to their sometimes extortionate foreign transaction fees.
I lived in London for about 10 years and used the Oyster almost exclusively (with auto-topup enabled)
The biggest advantage I found was the latency between you tapping the card on the reader and the acknowledgement "beep" to let you through. Always seemed extremely responsive to the point where you get used to the motion of going through the barriers with one fell swoop.
When using anything else (e.g. credit cards/Apple Pay/whatever) the difference always seemed jarring, like maybe an extra 200ms-300ms longer for the thing to light green.
It might have gotten better since I was there though.
Presto in Canada is built on similar technology, but no existing implementations were used because it's more expensive that way (thanks capitalism!)
For us, the tap takes half a second. If a queue forms, you'll be waiting awhile. It takes 2-3s if your card is in a purse, too.
Purse notwithstanding, it probably takes that long because the balance is not stored on the card. A round-trip to an external server is required.
Worse yet, if you try to use a freshly loaded Presto card on a terminal that is not internet-enabled (read: city buses), you cannot, because the offline terminal is only synced once a day. Don't even get me started...
IIRC Japan's FeliCa (Suica, PASMO, etc.) is much faster because it had more stringent timing requirements in the spec because of how many people they needed to be able to walk through a turnstile, which increases the cost of the associated hardware (the readers in the turnstiles/trains/buses, as well as in e.g. iPhone chips).
IIRC Presto does store the value on the card -- when you load value online, every bus/train/turnstile gets a batch data file of cards it needs to update the balance for, and checks every card that passes through it to see if yours is one of them, and then writes the updated balance to the card. But the slower scans are due to the choice of a different standardized transit pass format (one that allows for much slower -- IIRC, hundreds of ms -- reads/writes than the Japanese standard).
For the Japanese cards, there are Android apps that can read the last several transactions using the phone's NFC chip, so there's obviously local storage there too. Although my guess is there's redundancy with online data to ensure there's no shenanigans.
The cards also work on other things, like the many vending machines in Japan, I wonder if they're all online. Maybe the protocol is designed that subtractions are easy but additions are hard...
The balance is stored on the card, in fact the balance being stored on the card is something that people complain about constantly because there is a 24 hour period where the buses need to return to the depot to update and people hate that.
I use the “Express Travel Card” feature with Apple Pay now and it’s as fast as oyster was (in the wallet settings). I walk up to the gate with my phone in hand, locked, hold it over the reader and it’s super fast. I remember the slightly delay in the early days (plus verifying your ID with touch/face in advance of the gate) but I think it’s a solved issue now.
I can't find a source, but I recall reading that the staff oyster cards were significantly faster than the oyster cards provided to the public (~100ms rings a bell).
I'd love to read it again if anyone has this information
In that context they are likely more of access badge than payment system. Thus far fewer steps to communicate and possibly even local copy of access database.
I have heard something like this from colleagues, and I can confirm that staff Oyster cards are very fast. But I've always felt that regular Oyster cards are very fast too, so I don't notice much difference.
When the validator detects a staff Oyster card, it does check if the card is hotlisted (in case it was lost/stolen). But otherwise there's very little logic required.
The old Oyster cards were really fast. But they had a security flaw, so they had to be replaced with newer ones that are slower to use :-( Both are still faster than a credit card.
My company did some work with TfL when Oystercards were being rolled out. A very clever bloke at work was tasked with working out an algorithm that would retrospectively minimise a passenger's spend based on their journey history - so e.g. If they'd done 9 single journeys in a week it might decide they'd have been better off buying a weekly pass, and adjust their balance accordingly. You have monthly and even annual passes to factor in as well of course.
He spent about 20 minutes one lunchtime trying to explain it to me, but it went straight over my head (I think 'alpha-beta pruning' was in there somewhere), but anyway it was all for naught as - hardly surprisingly - TfL had little appetite for software that would actually reduce their revenue.
I don't think it is? They're capped, but afaik it doesn't work out if you'd have been better off with some specific combination of prepaid travelcards and charge you that instead (which could be less than the caps in total)?
I don't think it can ever make sense to have a "combination of prepaid travelcards". A human that is guessing what to buy in advance might rationally choose to do this, but the machine knows the journeys you actually took.
They're priced such that it's not going to make sense to buy more than one if you could figure out the correct one to buy (which the algorithm can), and the cap is always cheaper or the same price than an equivalent travelcard if one exists.
Suppose I make one journey from Amersham to Chalfont, it's £1.60 off peak, if I make this journey over and over I hit the cap (for off peak travel more or less anywhere) at £13.60.
Now suppose that randomly during the rush hour, I make one other journey, from Waterloo to Victoria, in Zone 1. That costs £2.40 and being peak travel it isn't included in my cap, so my total is now £16.00
I can do that twice, maybe it happens in the morning rush hour, and again in the evening, and between then I run back and forth between Amersham and Chalfont, in this case my total is £18.40.
But if I did the Zone 1 peak journey a third time, a new cap kicks in, for zones 1-9 any time, at £19.30 and neither kind of journey costs any further money, nor do most journeys anywhere in the network since that's all the numbered zones and any time.
If the period and zone coverage were different it could couldn't it? A longer travelcard covering zones 2-3, (for work say) but then a much shorter period where you have a lot of travel in zone 1 (friend visiting so doing touristy things for a weekend say)?
Oyster's PAYG pricing only covers daily travel (either the whole day or the off peak). For a week or longer yes you should buy (on Oyster) a fixed duration travelcard in advance. But let's continue the thought experiment.
If you travel in zones 2-3 for work you would want a Travelcard for those journeys, indeed, and you'd likely buy that for an Oyster (I believe paper tickets for this still exist, but they might not) which is £27.70 per week, or maybe you do this constantly that's £1108 for the whole year.
However that work travelcard covers zone 1 anyway, so the tourist trips into zone 1 are free for you.
Suppose the tourist trips are instead outward, and you're entering zone 4. Now these trips aren't free, but the day travelcard that includes zone 4 is £13.90 and the Oyster cap to zone 4 is £10.60 so you won't save money by buying another travelcard for the tourist trips, using PAYG with the cap is significantly cheaper and easier.
One thing a careful Londoner might do if the tourist friend is visiting for a bit longer and they (for some reason) don't carry a very long period travelcard or it was due to expire anyway, is choose to "upgrade" to more zones for say one week and then buy their usual card again. Suppose your card runs out on Friday, your friend lands Saturday morning and you're taking a week off exploring Greater London with them. You could buy a zone 1-9 weekly card from Saturday to Friday, just under £100 for all trips almost anywhere in the network for that week.
However, the tourist gets almost as good a deal on their foreign credit card because it has a weekly cap, the TFL credit card system thinks only in Monday-Sunday weeks, so their maximum cost is £135.10 for the same trips (two days, plus one week) but if they sometimes don't hit the daily caps it'll be far lower, so even just two "quiet" days with fewer journeys or staying in central London would demolish the price difference.
Yes, although it's not exactly retrospective. The trick is, each time it sees your card the system is trying to figure out what the minimum price it could charge is for everything that happened so far. The fares are designed such that it can't ever be cheaper to do more journeys†, however it might not be more expensive, so the extra cost of any completed journey is always going to be somewhere between £0 and the maximum peak single fare.
This happens live because you are shown the current balance (which needs this calculation) when completing journeys in some places, and can also check it from outside the system.
So you can see that a journey you just made cost say 10p even though obviously there are no fares that low, because 10p was the difference between the cheapest way to do your previous set of journeys, and the cheapest way to do all those journeys plus the new one.
† There are sometimes weird corner cases where e.g. travelling one extra stop and walking back is slightly cheaper but that's a different journey not an extra one.
I don't understand how they could implement the savings / spending caps for contactless cards but couldn't do it at the same time for Oyster cards. It's insanity.
The contactless cards are logged then charged centrally. Stored value cards are charged at the gate. Central charging allows more flexibility as you have more data to work with.
oyster does have spending caps, but not the more complicated calcuations
why? oyster is a stored value card
the barrier where you tap-out calculates and takes the money off the card instantly, and given the interaction time to get you through the barrier the computation is necessarily limited
whereas a contactless card is effectively being a pointer to a bank account that can be charged at a later date
for TfL there is a batch process at the end of the day which does that
> for TfL there is a batch process at the end of the day which does that
Which can lead to some perplexing notifications from your bank at 0400 when it says you've just charged £N at A.N.Tube and it takes you a good three minutes before you realise it's not someone cloning your card but the journey you made 18 hours ago.
That’s what contactless cards do now, there’s a PAYG cap. When you read about it doesn’t really sound that complex (not sure if it needed a clever bloke with an algorithm, but then what do I know?)
I guess because they couldn’t work out a way for you to purchase a travel card on your contactless card, so this was the only way to allow regular commuters to use their contactless.
Anyway it was the reason I switched over from oyster to contactless. I realised I was getting ripped off as I would always use PAYG and _sometimes_ went over the caps.
There's some complexity arising from zones, and travelcards being based on zonal travel. So it's more complex than just capping it, or comparing it to the price of a travelcard, because you have to consider different combinations of travelcard (period and zone) and which journeys to ignore, leaving at PAYG rate.
I don't know what alpha-beta pruning is, and I'm not necessarily asserting it's massively complex, and I don't know anything about/haven't worked in the area beyond as a user - just pointing out it's not as simple as it might at first seem.
Last time I used digikey, they would notify me that if I bought a few more widgets I'd be eligible for bulk pricing, which would lower my bill. Sure, they would move more widgets, but would receive less money. I was a little shocked and impressed. I did buy more widgets, and did indeed lower my bill.
I find Amazon’s functionality of “you bought this item on March Xx, 20YY” to be similar. Sometimes I’m buying more dishwasher tablets (and the notice serves only to tell me that I’m buying the same thing), but it’s definitely caused me to not re-buy a book I already owned a few times and that left me with a very positive impression of Amazon.
There's a flip side to this that benefits amazon, though still very useful for the customer.
If I'm poking through something I maybe want but might get in person, and I find something I've already bought that fits my need again... I'm more likely to buy again than to wander over to a physical store. Especially true for things I don't buy often and then need suddenly, like casual clothing (oops, ripped it) or random felt pads for furniture (oh dear, that's going to scratch things up quick).
I'm also less likely to hem and haw about it until I just buy from a physical store. (For example, "these paper towels or those? idk, decide tomorrow" and then buy with groceries the next day.)
Besides, if you rebuy, then return, that's worse for them than if you just never rebought. Sure, they'll probably charge you a restock fee, but I'm not entirely convinced it covers the full cost to Amazon.
That’s another policy genius: almost nothing they sell has a return cost or restocking fee to the consumer (other than me having to drive it to a drop off point, of which there are many within 1.5 miles). That’s for a US Prime member anyway. I return very few things, but I’ve never been charged a penny for them.
That makes me way more likely to just buy from Amazon, even if another merchant is slightly cheaper.
My local bus company did this. 3 trips in a day? Price caps out at a day ticket. 14 trips in a week? Price caps out at a weekly ticket. Same for the month.
It has a weird effect where I would take a couple of extra journeys just to whack it into the next tier. Like head into Leeds on the bus to browse the shops and get lunch.
Prepaid single purpose cards like Oyster (and Opal and Myki in Sydney and Melbourne which I’m more familiar with) have a huge advantage in not being linked to your legal name and address in the way your credit card is. Removing that option links every trip on public transport to a legal identity overnight.
We only have these cards due to historical quirk (quick contactless technology existed, but not in credit cards), and if we lose them, it’s another thing that we’re never getting back.
(I protested the removal of paper tickets from Sydney’s trains and busses, for what it’s worth…)
The purchase of credit can be linked for sure. But at least my trips can’t be tracked. I can say, use anyone’s travel card. Anyone can top up my card. I can top up with cash. Whatever. Each individual trip can’t be tied to a person.
We don’t want to lose this privacy because as mentioned. We’ll never get it back.
Sorry to break it to you but I'm pretty sure that unless you're actively swapping Oyster cards with random strangers, the pattern of metadata of where and when that card enters and exits the Underground or Overground, or when it takes a bus ride (and the route number at least) can soon yield a useful collection of data points (which in turn can be cross-referenced with CCTV timestamps) for any "authority" that's interested in tracking you.
Most tourists should find their contactless card or equivalent (e.g an iPhone) just works. There may be a brief extra pause, especially the very first time you touch a gate, as the system figures out that yes this is a payment card, and yes it can afford to pay for a journey on the network. So, probably don't choose peak time at a crowded station to find out if your card or phone works.
I would much prefer if this was true for most public transit networks in the world, including the rest of the UK.
TfL settles every 24 hours, so you'll only have a single purchase per 24H regardless of how many journeys you've taken.
I'd also argue that in this case the fault is on the cardholder for being with a shit bank when better options exist in the vast majority of countries.
The US does not have contactless credit cards. Britain has a financial and national security interest in American tourists — who will need oyster cards.
I have 2 Mastercards and 1 Visa. Only one of the Mastercards support contactless. The one without foreign transaction fees doesn't. It's also been vary hard to find a chip+pin card (without an annual fee) instead of a chip+signature even though it's been around for what, 20 years now?
In general even if the card isn't contactless, a decent phone, which can perform contactless transactions, can be hooked to the same account anyway.
In fact I deliberately own a non-contactless credit card (from my good bank, who were happy to send me the non-contactless version when requested even though their default is contactless) and then enrolled that card in my phone so the phone can make contactless purchases.
Thus, my credit card can't be hijacked to do remote purchases because purchases with the card require a physical connection, and yet I can make fairly large card purchases contactlessly, because my phone vouches for them after I unlock it.
That is true, but even with a US card in the US, there are vague scenarios where ApplePay requires a signature[1]. So it's problematic using it for unmanned terminals when traveling. I've had trouble traveling internationally and wouldn't trust it taking mass transit without extra time or a backup option.
Obviously TfL can't do anything about a US bank/ card issuer having policies that lose them money, but the turnstiles are aware that they have no (passenger accessible) inputs and so they do not ask for a signature.
EMV lets the card (or in this case maybe a phone) and the terminal (in this case a turnstile inside the station, or a reader on a bus) negotiate what to do, the issuer may not be involved since it's possible they'll agree the entire transaction needn't yet involve the issuer. This is related to one bug in EMV, you could intercede in the middle to tell the card "It's OK, no need for a PIN" and also tell the terminal, "Yes, the PIN supplied was correct" and since the terminal doesn't know the correct PIN you've now got a shim that allows you to use the wrong PIN with a stolen card†.
Anyway, TfL terminals aren't going to agree to signatures. So, if your card really does only work with a signature then you can't use the turnstiles, along with presumably many other modern conveniences.
† There are obvious technical fixes. But the fixes cost money, and fraud is a cost banks can pass to their customers, guess what happens next.
I'm from the US and haven't had great luck in Europe. One card ditched "travel alerts" in 2016, the other I swore added one when it saw I purchased plane tickets, but it didn't. Both got flagged causing problems. One card I specifically got because it had no foreign transaction fees and was recommended for traveling. Only one of my cards is contactless and I about every 4th or 5th transaction I get flagged and they need to enter info from my ID to complete the transaction. For a lot of services that require preauthorization just don't work and don't give clear error messages.
Even if my card worked the first time I wouldn't trust it would work the 3rd or 4th. Until I bought a monthly pass every trip took time and some luck. I wish I knew prepaid cards were an option.
You can fill an anonymously purchased Oyster with actual coins at select locations. I used to fill mine with otherwise useless small change periodically. In this way the Oyster is not tied to a credit card, although of course TFL does have CCTV so if they really wanted to (e.g. you murder somebody and leave the card at the scene) they could trawl through the CCTV footage matching the times the card was used.
With credit card payment, facial recognition, cell phone GPS tracking, etc. I think they can connect you to the trip even if you used Oyster. And if they're taking photographs of the currency that ATM machines are spitting out (easily possible) there's nothing to suggest that they can't track cash transactions as well.
My thinking has always been that yes, targeted surveillance of a target in public is easy, but is it “every trip in a searchable database” easy? Facial recognition is the one here that actually does make it that easy, hence my strong opposition to it!
With enough effort, anything is possible. When it comes to hiding from authorities (or anyone, really), it's only a matter of putting up more roadblocks than they're willing to overcome.
They're human, too. Often dumb, most often uninterested and lazy. And everyone gives up at some point.
It wasn't that long ago, I am certain your comment would have been downvoted on HN.
It wasn't that long ago Google or Apple were Saint. The future is Apple Pay, Cashless, Contactless Credit Card, Crypto.
It wasn't that long ago people that worries about privacy or freedom were over reacting, paranoid, pessimistic.
It wasn't that long ago having physical Cash, topping up your Oyster / Opal / Myki / Suica / Octopus / EZ-Link / Presto or any other Top Up Prepaid Card were dumb. The future is Apple Wallet.
Privacy does have a cost. I was working at TfNSW at the time they were phasing out the paper tickets and the main reason they got rid of them was the enormous cost of having and maintaining all that paper ticket infrastructure. I think it was basically going to cost alot more to have the ticket infrastructure than the revenue gained back from the actual tickets due to the very small number of people still using the paper tickets.
In fact most of the decisions around ticketing were more about reducing costs and improving efficiency than reducing privacy (that was just the side effect) for example on buses people paying with cash were massively slowing down the boarding in busy areas, so they made pre-pay or opal only buses during peak hours hours in some areas to improve the on time running. Bus drivers also hated dealing with change and carrying money as well. They were already trying to phase out the use of cash on buses and I think covid accelerated that trend as they now had a great excuse to do so everywhere.
In fact even a few years ago there was already discussion of using CCTV and facial recognition to track people through stations and what they use, the idea being you could then pay for your trip the same way those Amazon supermarkets work as that would reduce the congestion at gates and allow better tracking of full trips as Opal data can't determine your exact route, only the parts where you tapped.
The reality is most people will complain far more about having to pay slightly higher ticket costs than for the loss of privacy, so it's a fairly easy decision for politicians to make and why Australia has so many sweeping surveillance powers.
They'll have to have something for kids and anyone who can't/wont get a card (tourists from non rfid countries, people with horrendous credit or fraud in their history, weird religious sorts etc).
It's possible to have a basic bank account that doesn't have a debit card. It's usually used by people who have trouble controlling their spending, or have been convicted of fraud.
I lived in Birmingham for a few years and loved the ticket apps.
Just buy a few tickets (so you can replicate the font), screenshot the whole thing and edit them with a new date and maybe a different number and you can travel for free, controller approved!
At least I never got a QR code scanned, they just looked at the screen and moved on. Love you all!
In London at least, revenue inspectors often work in partnership with the police. But many cases of fraud are resolved without needing to detain the fraudster.
While this type of behaviour is bad, the fact that the inspectors de facto defraud their own employer by not checking the QR codes seems worse to me. They get paid and can't be bothered?
When I take a train in Czechia with a digital ticket, the conductor always scans the QR code.
Did they have some sort of agreement not to complete with commercial cashless payment systems? It always puzzled me why you couldn't use your oyster card to pay for a sandwich or even a platform vending machine? Everyone had the card yet they only worked for transport tickets?
I think there were concerns that that would be equivalent to the Government running a bank, which was either illegal, or frowned upon in the prevailing economic thinking.
Betteridge's law applies as it always does. Oyster isn’t going anywhere because there are always going to be those edge cases.
Tourists who would pay large fx fees if they use their contactless cards, children prone to spending their contactless balance on sweets, those groups that get free travel anyway.
One advantage that an Oyster card has over a contactless payment card is that I still feel uncomfortable getting my wallet out and finding a payment card in a crowded tube station. Even using Apple/Google Pay requires me to get my phone out and again, I'm not always comfortable doing that. I appreciate I might be a little old fashioned about this but enough friends have been robbed in London over the years to make me a little paranoid. An Oyster Card, on the other hand, has sufficiently little value to me that I'm a lot more comfortable using it.
A simpler solution to all these ticketing systems is just to make public transport free. We already have taxes at all geography levels if we want it to be paid by a given city or region. People that don't use it benefit from it anyway by having less congestion in their private transport. Touristy cities already charge a fee per night to pay for the services tourists use. There's no point running these complex billing systems. Save that money to invest in the transport itself.
It's an interesting idea, though when you consider that a lot of the people who use public transport in London don't actually live in London, and some services extend outside of London, it does raise a lot of questions. And that's before you even get into the political factors.
Those challenges aren't necessarily insurmountable, but I imagine it would be a lot more complicated to do than it might first appear.
It's not possible if public transport is operated by company. I don't think it's good thing to government buy all public transport including profitable rails.
I don't think the idea of making public transport free (at the point of use) is entirely incompatible with a railway operated by the private sector. The company will need some form of income, but that can come in the form of fares, taxes, or a combination.
Operating a railway is not a very profitable business as it is. The National Rail network is transforming into Great British Railways. It's not complete nationalisation, but the government will have a lot more control. I get the feeling that the private train operating companies are generally welcoming of the changes, especially since it means the state will shoulder the financial risk.
>He said: "I can't imagine a situation where everyone either will have a bank account and card suitable to pay and wants to.
>She said: "One of the biggest inequalities of modern tech and the widening gap is digital poverty, because there are people who are very reliant on their digital packages who take for granted their access to the internet.
"There are still a lot of people paying in cash who could be flying under the radar.
"If you do remove one-on-one payments and totally automate there's a group of people unable to use the service properly - or [have to] illegally - because they don't have a choice."
I am so happy to read this. Not everyday you have people caring about these sort of thing. Or May be tech is mostly dominated by Silicon Valley who dont sort of give a damn.
I still think Oyster card performs better than Visa PayWave / Master PayPass or Apple Pay / Google Pay. Although none of them are anywhere near as good as Suica Card in Japan.
Suica or any of the FeliCa-based cards in Japan are stunning really, the ecosystem is great. They're super fast, don't require sign-ups and work anywhere in the country nowadays, even in most shops.
And you can get virtual ones on your phone these days, auto recharging via credit card. Best of both worlds, works in way more places than contactless EMV.
And it still works even if you root your phone or install LineageOS, which is also a big plus for me (it's why I can't use Google Pay).
These days some do. I have a Pixel 4a 5G. I bought it in Japan, but I don't believe it's a special Japan model in any way, and obviously doesn't have any special firmware either since I installed vanilla LineageOS on it. Worldwide models intended to be sold in Japan are starting to have the feature.
As long as the hardware FeliCa secure element is there, all you have to do is install the relevant apps from the Play Store (the apps themselves might be region locked; I do have my Play Store account set to Japan)
So it isn't; all phones have the hardware. However, it seems something blocks the FeliCa apps from running on non-Japanese phones. It could be just a region flag.
(Don't trust customer support sites for technical information; the people writing those don't know how the real hardware works)
Private companies can, to a large extent, target and accommodate only a subset of the market.
However, a public transport system has to be for everyone. There are legal and political consequences to making it difficult or impossible for certain demographics to use public transport. There's also the fact that the most marginalised in our society are often incredibly reliant on public transport. That's why TfL and other public bodies have to undertake an Equality Impact Assessment for any policy change and take these things very seriously.
The removal of cash from buses seems (as mentioned in the article) to be a similar change. I wonder what the Equality Impact Assessment outcome was for that. Although that is less severe than removing cash as an option via removing Oyster cards entirely, as a homeless person could still reasonably use cash to top up an Oyster card and use that for the bus, instead of a contactless card - which I think a fixed address is required for?)
You're right that contactless cards usually require a fixed address, although some banks allow you to use any address you can receive post at (e.g. a friend's address).
This is why I roll my eyes anytime someone wants to "run government like a business". Government fundamentally must serve everyone, covering all the messy edge cases like unbanked people, and people who don't speak the native language.
Businesses look for efficiencies and that often means limiting their services to specific groups or requiring many prerequisites (either stated or implied). Government doesn't have that luxury and therefore has to be some level of inefficient. That doesn't stop government from offering modern internet-based services, it just means they have to keep the fallback process as well. For example, I can do my annual license plate renewal online with a credit card from the comfort of my home. If I don't have a credit card I can also go down to the ministry of transport office and pay in cash. A business could easily decide having physical offices all over the province is grossly expensive and make a switch to online payments only. Government doesn't (and shouldn't) have that option.
>Private companies can, to a large extent, target and accommodate only a subset of the market.
I absolutely agree. Except these private company were publicly advocating to abolish physical cash and top up card. Pushing their narrative towards a future which everything goes through Smartphone where the company have a strategic interest in doing so. While proclaiming themselves as the guardian of privacy and protector of their users.
This isn't the first time the subject of dropping Oyster card or any Top Up card payment in any part of the world has come up. Last time ( if I remember correctly it was 2016, roughly during the launch of Android Pay on Tfl or something like that, thinking about it now it might have been a PR piece ) there were people in the general public who really believe the future is cashless and all in Smartphone. And the general narrative at the time was dropping Oyster card some time in the future was inevitable because Tfl and other Transport companies around the world doesn't want the burden of running their own payment system in other to save cost. And if I remember correctly the answer Tfl gave at the time wasn't as clear cut as it is now.
So I am extremely happy to read a firm stand from Tfl on this issue.
Oyster cards are great for visitors and that doesn't necessarily mean tourists.
When my friend from outside London came I lent them a spare Oyster card and we could get going immediately without them having to worry about the cost.
Paper tickets so the same but the daily travel card is much more expensive.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 67.5 ms ] threadOh I remember. Now it's £1.55 and rising. Public transport in the UK is now becoming luxury
To add, this GA/AG pass in Switzerland includes essentially all travel except for a few funiculars, gondolas, and other specialized modes for leisure purposes. That means virtually every train in the country with the densest railway network outside of city-states as well as local transit (buses, local trains, ferries, etc.) is included.
Granted, Switzerland isn't a large country, but its public transit coverage is overrepresented, making it seem like a far better deal than this annual London zone pass.
Outside of London, UK public transport varies greatly in quality and all of it is very expensive and overpriced. UK season tickets for lines outside of London typically involve a fixed route on one operator and usually only support commuting: one there and back journey 5 days per week max. By contrast, the GA in Switzerland really is unlimited. It will work equally well for boats crossing the lake in Geneva as it will for the local trams in Zürich and the train to get you between them, even if you travel on a Sunday. It doesn't matter if you present it to cantonal transport people, or private train operators, it will work, no arguments. Pretty much the only people not part of the GA scheme are tourist train routes up mountains, and to be honest, that's fair enough - staff to the facilities on the top likely get a free ride up anyway and nobody else needs to commute to the top of the Jungfrau.
If I remember correctly, one of the reasons public transportation outside london is so poor in comparison is that councils outside London are not allowed to subsidise it the same way London is. They are also forced to use private operators.
You can do this with the tube, although it's less often necessary, e.g. suppose you're at Barbican and you live in Amersham. It might happen that your tube from Barbican turns into a Fast to Amersham and that's actually a reasonable way to get home. But much more likely you should disembark at Baker Street, leave the station, walk a few minutes to Marylebone, tap back in and board a mainline train to Amersham, since that's actually the same exact system and counts as a single Oyster journey between Barbican and Amersham.
[0] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/investors/funding-sources
I suppose you could just issue EMV-compatible cards where you grant the holder free travel, though I'd expect this would be more complicated than the status-quo (both in terms of needing to register IDs in lists that aren't particularly long currently, and in terms of needing a much larger standard implemented).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPTA_Key
Essentially your card becomes a reference to an online account. When you tap your EMV card, it uses it as a reference to find your online account and see if you have any travel passes associated with it.
There is talk of introducing it on the London Underground. The system already allows customers to associate a card with an account online to track their journey history. But nothing seems to have moved on much in the last few years.
I would assume that TfL is investing that static £550m. Even at a 1% gain annually, that's a nice chunk of profit from sitting on Oyster cash
[0] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/refunds-and-replacements/oyster-pay...
For older Oyster cards that have a deposit, you can still reclaim that £5.
The fee/deposit payment is part of it (prevention, it not seeming a disposable item) but with a deposit (there's no good way to say this..) there's also the incentive for the homeless or otherwise desperate to clear them up, since there's some guaranteed value. (Which could be a bit less than £5 due to negative get-me-home-at-night balance, but I don't think it's allowed to go as far as -£5, so a card with a deposit on it is always an asset.)
When I was living in the UK I only had an oystercard to lend it to friends and family visiting. Used Apple pay or my creditcard for all of my own travel.
I'm far from an expert, but the OV-chipkaart was implemented 15 years ago. At the time 3G connectivity on buses and trams couldn't always be guaranteed, and the tech in the readers was also limited. To me it seems that executing all transactions on the card itself and balancing the books later makes sense given these limitations.
(That's not to say I don't have any criticisms on the system - I think the entire 'omchecken' procedure when switching between train companies could have been avoided and doesn't benefit passengers at all, and the system also doesn't allow for a fare cap at the day/week/month ticket level like Oyster.)
[1] https://tweakers.net/nieuws/77247/uitrol-veiligere-ov-chipka...
It is shocking how much better the much older MTR system is in Hong Kong in comparison.
Okay, but you disagree based on a different system. I’m not sure what’s the disagreement about, GP was expressing their opinion about Oyster vs OV. Regardless, when I was working in London and areas from 2008 to 2012, I loved it. Used it on every form of transport and topped up everywhere, simple swipe and done.
OV card is also very nice. Swipe while getting on / off and done. The Oyster system felt a little bit more convenient with regards to the reader placement but OV is okay.
I think it's really only useful for season tickets now, which is probably significant so I don't think they'll disappear any time soon.
It’s been a few years so my figures are likely a bit off but you can get a student Oyster card (which gets you something like 30% off all journeys) and then you can link it with your 18-25 rail card and get a further 30% off the tube during off peak times. It all adds up to a huge saving.
Tourism is another; foreign cards can often work but it depends on the issuing bank and is subject to their sometimes extortionate foreign transaction fees.
I'm not a fan of offering discounts to random sections of the population, but that's the same use-case as season tickets.
Maybe I should have used the term "travel card" rather than season ticket.
The biggest advantage I found was the latency between you tapping the card on the reader and the acknowledgement "beep" to let you through. Always seemed extremely responsive to the point where you get used to the motion of going through the barriers with one fell swoop.
When using anything else (e.g. credit cards/Apple Pay/whatever) the difference always seemed jarring, like maybe an extra 200ms-300ms longer for the thing to light green.
It might have gotten better since I was there though.
Presto in Canada is built on similar technology, but no existing implementations were used because it's more expensive that way (thanks capitalism!)
For us, the tap takes half a second. If a queue forms, you'll be waiting awhile. It takes 2-3s if your card is in a purse, too.
Purse notwithstanding, it probably takes that long because the balance is not stored on the card. A round-trip to an external server is required.
Worse yet, if you try to use a freshly loaded Presto card on a terminal that is not internet-enabled (read: city buses), you cannot, because the offline terminal is only synced once a day. Don't even get me started...
IIRC Presto does store the value on the card -- when you load value online, every bus/train/turnstile gets a batch data file of cards it needs to update the balance for, and checks every card that passes through it to see if yours is one of them, and then writes the updated balance to the card. But the slower scans are due to the choice of a different standardized transit pass format (one that allows for much slower -- IIRC, hundreds of ms -- reads/writes than the Japanese standard).
I stand corrected!
The cards also work on other things, like the many vending machines in Japan, I wonder if they're all online. Maybe the protocol is designed that subtractions are easy but additions are hard...
The balance is stored on the card, in fact the balance being stored on the card is something that people complain about constantly because there is a 24 hour period where the buses need to return to the depot to update and people hate that.
I'd love to read it again if anyone has this information
When the validator detects a staff Oyster card, it does check if the card is hotlisted (in case it was lost/stolen). But otherwise there's very little logic required.
He spent about 20 minutes one lunchtime trying to explain it to me, but it went straight over my head (I think 'alpha-beta pruning' was in there somewhere), but anyway it was all for naught as - hardly surprisingly - TfL had little appetite for software that would actually reduce their revenue.
They're priced such that it's not going to make sense to buy more than one if you could figure out the correct one to buy (which the algorithm can), and the cap is always cheaper or the same price than an equivalent travelcard if one exists.
Suppose I make one journey from Amersham to Chalfont, it's £1.60 off peak, if I make this journey over and over I hit the cap (for off peak travel more or less anywhere) at £13.60.
Now suppose that randomly during the rush hour, I make one other journey, from Waterloo to Victoria, in Zone 1. That costs £2.40 and being peak travel it isn't included in my cap, so my total is now £16.00
I can do that twice, maybe it happens in the morning rush hour, and again in the evening, and between then I run back and forth between Amersham and Chalfont, in this case my total is £18.40.
But if I did the Zone 1 peak journey a third time, a new cap kicks in, for zones 1-9 any time, at £19.30 and neither kind of journey costs any further money, nor do most journeys anywhere in the network since that's all the numbered zones and any time.
Oyster's PAYG pricing only covers daily travel (either the whole day or the off peak). For a week or longer yes you should buy (on Oyster) a fixed duration travelcard in advance. But let's continue the thought experiment.
If you travel in zones 2-3 for work you would want a Travelcard for those journeys, indeed, and you'd likely buy that for an Oyster (I believe paper tickets for this still exist, but they might not) which is £27.70 per week, or maybe you do this constantly that's £1108 for the whole year.
However that work travelcard covers zone 1 anyway, so the tourist trips into zone 1 are free for you.
Suppose the tourist trips are instead outward, and you're entering zone 4. Now these trips aren't free, but the day travelcard that includes zone 4 is £13.90 and the Oyster cap to zone 4 is £10.60 so you won't save money by buying another travelcard for the tourist trips, using PAYG with the cap is significantly cheaper and easier.
One thing a careful Londoner might do if the tourist friend is visiting for a bit longer and they (for some reason) don't carry a very long period travelcard or it was due to expire anyway, is choose to "upgrade" to more zones for say one week and then buy their usual card again. Suppose your card runs out on Friday, your friend lands Saturday morning and you're taking a week off exploring Greater London with them. You could buy a zone 1-9 weekly card from Saturday to Friday, just under £100 for all trips almost anywhere in the network for that week.
However, the tourist gets almost as good a deal on their foreign credit card because it has a weekly cap, the TFL credit card system thinks only in Monday-Sunday weeks, so their maximum cost is £135.10 for the same trips (two days, plus one week) but if they sometimes don't hit the daily caps it'll be far lower, so even just two "quiet" days with fewer journeys or staying in central London would demolish the price difference.
Oh, you're right, that's what I was missing; I could've sworn you could get 2&3-only travelcards.
This happens live because you are shown the current balance (which needs this calculation) when completing journeys in some places, and can also check it from outside the system.
So you can see that a journey you just made cost say 10p even though obviously there are no fares that low, because 10p was the difference between the cheapest way to do your previous set of journeys, and the cheapest way to do all those journeys plus the new one.
† There are sometimes weird corner cases where e.g. travelling one extra stop and walking back is slightly cheaper but that's a different journey not an extra one.
why? oyster is a stored value card
the barrier where you tap-out calculates and takes the money off the card instantly, and given the interaction time to get you through the barrier the computation is necessarily limited
whereas a contactless card is effectively being a pointer to a bank account that can be charged at a later date
for TfL there is a batch process at the end of the day which does that
Which can lead to some perplexing notifications from your bank at 0400 when it says you've just charged £N at A.N.Tube and it takes you a good three minutes before you realise it's not someone cloning your card but the journey you made 18 hours ago.
I guess because they couldn’t work out a way for you to purchase a travel card on your contactless card, so this was the only way to allow regular commuters to use their contactless.
Anyway it was the reason I switched over from oyster to contactless. I realised I was getting ripped off as I would always use PAYG and _sometimes_ went over the caps.
I don't know what alpha-beta pruning is, and I'm not necessarily asserting it's massively complex, and I don't know anything about/haven't worked in the area beyond as a user - just pointing out it's not as simple as it might at first seem.
Basically, you do a breadth-first full recursive solve, but bail out of any branch that is clearly worse than other candidates.
If I'm poking through something I maybe want but might get in person, and I find something I've already bought that fits my need again... I'm more likely to buy again than to wander over to a physical store. Especially true for things I don't buy often and then need suddenly, like casual clothing (oops, ripped it) or random felt pads for furniture (oh dear, that's going to scratch things up quick).
I'm also less likely to hem and haw about it until I just buy from a physical store. (For example, "these paper towels or those? idk, decide tomorrow" and then buy with groceries the next day.)
Besides, if you rebuy, then return, that's worse for them than if you just never rebought. Sure, they'll probably charge you a restock fee, but I'm not entirely convinced it covers the full cost to Amazon.
That makes me way more likely to just buy from Amazon, even if another merchant is slightly cheaper.
It has a weird effect where I would take a couple of extra journeys just to whack it into the next tier. Like head into Leeds on the bus to browse the shops and get lunch.
We only have these cards due to historical quirk (quick contactless technology existed, but not in credit cards), and if we lose them, it’s another thing that we’re never getting back.
(I protested the removal of paper tickets from Sydney’s trains and busses, for what it’s worth…)
We don’t want to lose this privacy because as mentioned. We’ll never get it back.
Sorry to break it to you but I'm pretty sure that unless you're actively swapping Oyster cards with random strangers, the pattern of metadata of where and when that card enters and exits the Underground or Overground, or when it takes a bus ride (and the route number at least) can soon yield a useful collection of data points (which in turn can be cross-referenced with CCTV timestamps) for any "authority" that's interested in tracking you.
IIRC you can’t have a WeChat pay account without a Chinese bank account.
I would much prefer if this was true for most public transit networks in the world, including the rest of the UK.
I'd also argue that in this case the fault is on the cardholder for being with a shit bank when better options exist in the vast majority of countries.
In fact I deliberately own a non-contactless credit card (from my good bank, who were happy to send me the non-contactless version when requested even though their default is contactless) and then enrolled that card in my phone so the phone can make contactless purchases.
Thus, my credit card can't be hijacked to do remote purchases because purchases with the card require a physical connection, and yet I can make fairly large card purchases contactlessly, because my phone vouches for them after I unlock it.
[1] https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/when-apple-pay-requi...
EMV lets the card (or in this case maybe a phone) and the terminal (in this case a turnstile inside the station, or a reader on a bus) negotiate what to do, the issuer may not be involved since it's possible they'll agree the entire transaction needn't yet involve the issuer. This is related to one bug in EMV, you could intercede in the middle to tell the card "It's OK, no need for a PIN" and also tell the terminal, "Yes, the PIN supplied was correct" and since the terminal doesn't know the correct PIN you've now got a shim that allows you to use the wrong PIN with a stolen card†.
Anyway, TfL terminals aren't going to agree to signatures. So, if your card really does only work with a signature then you can't use the turnstiles, along with presumably many other modern conveniences.
† There are obvious technical fixes. But the fixes cost money, and fraud is a cost banks can pass to their customers, guess what happens next.
Even if my card worked the first time I wouldn't trust it would work the 3rd or 4th. Until I bought a monthly pass every trip took time and some luck. I wish I knew prepaid cards were an option.
They're human, too. Often dumb, most often uninterested and lazy. And everyone gives up at some point.
It wasn't that long ago Google or Apple were Saint. The future is Apple Pay, Cashless, Contactless Credit Card, Crypto.
It wasn't that long ago people that worries about privacy or freedom were over reacting, paranoid, pessimistic.
It wasn't that long ago having physical Cash, topping up your Oyster / Opal / Myki / Suica / Octopus / EZ-Link / Presto or any other Top Up Prepaid Card were dumb. The future is Apple Wallet.
How the tides have turned
In fact most of the decisions around ticketing were more about reducing costs and improving efficiency than reducing privacy (that was just the side effect) for example on buses people paying with cash were massively slowing down the boarding in busy areas, so they made pre-pay or opal only buses during peak hours hours in some areas to improve the on time running. Bus drivers also hated dealing with change and carrying money as well. They were already trying to phase out the use of cash on buses and I think covid accelerated that trend as they now had a great excuse to do so everywhere.
In fact even a few years ago there was already discussion of using CCTV and facial recognition to track people through stations and what they use, the idea being you could then pay for your trip the same way those Amazon supermarkets work as that would reduce the congestion at gates and allow better tracking of full trips as Opal data can't determine your exact route, only the parts where you tapped.
The reality is most people will complain far more about having to pay slightly higher ticket costs than for the loss of privacy, so it's a fairly easy decision for politicians to make and why Australia has so many sweeping surveillance powers.
Just buy a few tickets (so you can replicate the font), screenshot the whole thing and edit them with a new date and maybe a different number and you can travel for free, controller approved!
At least I never got a QR code scanned, they just looked at the screen and moved on. Love you all!
When I take a train in Czechia with a digital ticket, the conductor always scans the QR code.
So I thought, fuck this. Treat me like a piece of shit and I'll act like a piece of shit.
I get it, that's how the system works. Well, sometimes I'm sick of playing.
So yeah, stick me in jail. Just don't ever release me, that's a bad idea.
Tourists who would pay large fx fees if they use their contactless cards, children prone to spending their contactless balance on sweets, those groups that get free travel anyway.
Once inside I'm conscious of potential pickpockets but no longer expect a mugging as a serious threat.
In contrast NYC and San Francisco's systems felt much more sketchy late at night, think it might've been the reduced staff presence
Those challenges aren't necessarily insurmountable, but I imagine it would be a lot more complicated to do than it might first appear.
Operating a railway is not a very profitable business as it is. The National Rail network is transforming into Great British Railways. It's not complete nationalisation, but the government will have a lot more control. I get the feeling that the private train operating companies are generally welcoming of the changes, especially since it means the state will shoulder the financial risk.
>She said: "One of the biggest inequalities of modern tech and the widening gap is digital poverty, because there are people who are very reliant on their digital packages who take for granted their access to the internet. "There are still a lot of people paying in cash who could be flying under the radar. "If you do remove one-on-one payments and totally automate there's a group of people unable to use the service properly - or [have to] illegally - because they don't have a choice."
I am so happy to read this. Not everyday you have people caring about these sort of thing. Or May be tech is mostly dominated by Silicon Valley who dont sort of give a damn.
I still think Oyster card performs better than Visa PayWave / Master PayPass or Apple Pay / Google Pay. Although none of them are anywhere near as good as Suica Card in Japan.
And it still works even if you root your phone or install LineageOS, which is also a big plus for me (it's why I can't use Google Pay).
As long as the hardware FeliCa secure element is there, all you have to do is install the relevant apps from the Play Store (the apps themselves might be region locked; I do have my Play Store account set to Japan)
> Pixel 3 and later smartphones purchased in Japan have a FeliCa chip in the same place as the NFC chip.
So it's special
So it isn't; all phones have the hardware. However, it seems something blocks the FeliCa apps from running on non-Japanese phones. It could be just a region flag.
(Don't trust customer support sites for technical information; the people writing those don't know how the real hardware works)
However, a public transport system has to be for everyone. There are legal and political consequences to making it difficult or impossible for certain demographics to use public transport. There's also the fact that the most marginalised in our society are often incredibly reliant on public transport. That's why TfL and other public bodies have to undertake an Equality Impact Assessment for any policy change and take these things very seriously.
https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/buses/cashless/
You're right that contactless cards usually require a fixed address, although some banks allow you to use any address you can receive post at (e.g. a friend's address).
Businesses look for efficiencies and that often means limiting their services to specific groups or requiring many prerequisites (either stated or implied). Government doesn't have that luxury and therefore has to be some level of inefficient. That doesn't stop government from offering modern internet-based services, it just means they have to keep the fallback process as well. For example, I can do my annual license plate renewal online with a credit card from the comfort of my home. If I don't have a credit card I can also go down to the ministry of transport office and pay in cash. A business could easily decide having physical offices all over the province is grossly expensive and make a switch to online payments only. Government doesn't (and shouldn't) have that option.
I absolutely agree. Except these private company were publicly advocating to abolish physical cash and top up card. Pushing their narrative towards a future which everything goes through Smartphone where the company have a strategic interest in doing so. While proclaiming themselves as the guardian of privacy and protector of their users.
This isn't the first time the subject of dropping Oyster card or any Top Up card payment in any part of the world has come up. Last time ( if I remember correctly it was 2016, roughly during the launch of Android Pay on Tfl or something like that, thinking about it now it might have been a PR piece ) there were people in the general public who really believe the future is cashless and all in Smartphone. And the general narrative at the time was dropping Oyster card some time in the future was inevitable because Tfl and other Transport companies around the world doesn't want the burden of running their own payment system in other to save cost. And if I remember correctly the answer Tfl gave at the time wasn't as clear cut as it is now.
So I am extremely happy to read a firm stand from Tfl on this issue.
When my friend from outside London came I lent them a spare Oyster card and we could get going immediately without them having to worry about the cost.
Paper tickets so the same but the daily travel card is much more expensive.