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…)
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
[+] [-] milderworkacc|4 years ago|reply
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…)
[+] [-] ksec|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] usrnm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spoonjim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fivefifty|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bserge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|4 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] ldjb|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] meibo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tragomaskhalos|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chris_j|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t0mas88|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] djhworld|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] basisword|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] david_allison|4 years ago|reply
I'd love to read it again if anyone has this information
[+] [-] indigomm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julianlam|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] pedrocr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ldjb|4 years ago|reply
Those challenges aren't necessarily insurmountable, but I imagine it would be a lot more complicated to do than it might first appear.
[+] [-] fomine3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gorgoiler|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsnedders|4 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] nhf|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPTA_Key
[+] [-] indigomm|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] defaulty|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] madeofpalk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zzandd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] saos|4 years ago|reply
Oh I remember. Now it's £1.55 and rising. Public transport in the UK is now becoming luxury
[+] [-] tialaramex|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] BoxOfRain|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edwardwatson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mytailorisrich|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjgreen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LatteLazy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OJFord|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuaxo|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gandalfian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] askvictor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exporectomy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bserge|4 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] Veen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ekaros|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnd999|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mytailorisrich|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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