11 ms·

London's Oyster card: Are its days numbered?

64 points by edward 5y ago

t0mas88 5y ago
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.
- Foobar8568 5y ago
  NL tech was outdated before it was even released.
  - Tijdreiziger 5y ago
    Can you expand on this? 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.)
    - vanviegen 5y ago
      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/ https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/ov-chip-card/
      - Tijdreiziger 5y ago
        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were replaced by cards with more secure chips in 2011 [1] - I think it's hardly fair to write off the entire system as 'outdated at launch' because of one (admittedly high-profile) security flaw. [1] https://tweakers.net/nieuws/77247/uitrol-veiligere-ov-chipkaart-is-al-begonnen.html https://tweakers.net/nieuws/77247/uitrol-veiligere-ov-chipka...
        Foobar8568 5y ago
        Considering that I have seen the code behind these systems, it was an ugly mess and outdated systems.
        Tijdreiziger 5y ago
        Alright, I'm willing to take your word on that. I only experienced it as a user :)
    - Foobar8568 5y ago
      Well a good part of the back office at that time was built on MMC consoles in addition to what Vanviegen said on MiFare cards.
- starky 5y ago
  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.
  - rad_gruchalski 5y ago
    > 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.
saos 5y ago
> Back then, your bus might have been bendy and cost between 70p and £1 to board. Oh I remember. Now it's £1.55 and rising. Public transport in the UK is now becoming luxury
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  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_mitsuhiko 5y ago
    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.
    - vinay427 5y ago
      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.
    - zahllos 5y ago
      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.
gsnedders 5y ago
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).
- nhf 5y ago
  This is essentially what the new fare card in Philadelphia is. It's implemented as a prepaid MasterCard that can also hold transit specific passes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPTA_Key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPTA_Key
- indigomm 5y ago
  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.
defaulty 5y ago
> 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
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  I guess that's never money that they need to pay out to anyone, so there's no difference if someone "uses" the money on the Oyster or not
  - csnover 5y ago
    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. [0] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/refunds-and-replacements/oyster-pay-as-you-go-credit-no-longer-needed https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/refunds-and-replacements/oyster-pay...
    - OJFord 5y ago
      And the cards themselves are worth a £5 deposit. (Clever IMO - ever seen one littered?)
      - ldjb 5y ago
        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.
        OJFord 5y ago
mytailorisrich 5y ago
With ubiquitous contactless payments there is no longer really a use for Oyster cards for pay-as-you-go journeys. 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.
- basisword 5y ago
  There’s one really good use - student discounts. 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.
- andylynch 5y ago
  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.
  - mytailorisrich 5y ago
    "season tickets" exist and work well for tourist. Cards that allow unlimited travel for a few days. 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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
djhworld 5y ago
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.
- julianlam 5y ago
  Do you know why Oyster cards are so seamless? 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...
  - cbhl 5y ago
    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).
    - 5y ago
tragomaskhalos 5y ago
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.
- shawabawa3 5y ago
  It wasn't all for naught. That's how oyster (and now contactless payments) work
  - OJFord 5y ago
    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)?
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      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.
milderworkacc 5y ago
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…)
- usrnm 5y ago
  If you paid for it with your credit card, then it certainly is linked to your name. And not a lot of people use cash these days
  - ace2358 5y ago
    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.
    - lozf 5y ago
      > But at least my trips can’t be tracked. 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.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    It’s still nice for people who may not have (local) bank accounts, namely poor people and tourists. IIRC you can’t have a WeChat pay account without a Chinese bank account.
LatteLazy 5y ago
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).
- OJFord 5y ago
  Not sure what credit/fraud has to do with it, unless some how so bad someone can't have a bank account? It doesn't have to be a credit card.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    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.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Could use a pre-pay card in that first scenario. (No idea about fraudster restrictions.)
  - piperswe 5y ago
    If you write enough bad checks or defraud enough banks, you can get put on a sort of banking no-fly-list
bserge 5y ago
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!
- Veen 5y ago
  My local bus ticket app has a rolling ball and other animations to prevent that sort of ticket forgery.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I wonder if ticket inspectors can detain for fraud. Sadly probably not, so this type of behaviour won't end up in jail...
  - ldjb 5y ago
    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.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    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.
  - bserge 5y ago
    I had to choose between eating and paying for tickets. I paid the tickets. Ran out of money, got fined and kicked off several times until payday. 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.
gandalfian 5y ago
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?
- askvictor 5y ago
  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.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Might be to keep fraud down since you can re-sell physical items or buy a lot of them at once, unlike transport rides.
mnd999 5y ago
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.
chris_j 5y ago
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.
- mnahkies 5y ago
  I generally feel much more likely to be robbed prior to entering the tube stations (eg walking under Putney bridge). 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
  - pierrefermat1 5y ago
    Yes seems to make little sense to go for any robbing to occur in a high CCTV coverage area and where bystanders can easily step in.
pedrocr 5y ago
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.
- gorgoiler 5y ago
  How would you deal with overcrowding?
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    Few people make journeys in rush hours for the fun of it so making it free I doubt would add much crowding.
- ldjb 5y ago
  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.
- fomine3 5y ago
  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.
  - ldjb 5y ago
    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.
ksec 5y ago
>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.
- meibo 5y ago
  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.
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    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).
    - tjpnz 5y ago
      I assume your phone was sold exclusively in Japan? Foreign phones don't work with this tech.
      - fomine3 5y ago
        Now worldwide iPhone supports Suica, but don't supported by almost all Android outside Japan.
stuaxo 5y ago
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.

64 points by edward 5y ago

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.

Foobar8568 5y ago
NL tech was outdated before it was even released.
- Tijdreiziger 5y ago
  Can you expand on this? 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.)
  - vanviegen 5y ago
    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/ https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/ov-chip-card/
    - Tijdreiziger 5y ago
      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. [1] https://tweakers.net/nieuws/77247/uitrol-veiligere-ov-chipkaart-is-al-begonnen.html https://tweakers.net/nieuws/77247/uitrol-veiligere-ov-chipka...
      - Foobar8568 5y ago
        Considering that I have seen the code behind these systems, it was an ugly mess and outdated systems.
        Tijdreiziger 5y ago
        Alright, I'm willing to take your word on that. I only experienced it as a user :)
  - Foobar8568 5y ago
    Well a good part of the back office at that time was built on MMC consoles in addition to what Vanviegen said on MiFare cards.
starky 5y ago
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.
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  > 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.

saos 5y ago

> Back then, your bus might have been bendy and cost between 70p and £1 to board. Oh I remember. Now it's £1.55 and rising. Public transport in the UK is now becoming luxury

BoxOfRain 5y ago
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_mitsuhiko 5y ago
  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.
  - vinay427 5y ago
    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.
  - zahllos 5y ago
    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.

gsnedders 5y ago

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).

nhf 5y ago
This is essentially what the new fare card in Philadelphia is. It's implemented as a prepaid MasterCard that can also hold transit specific passes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPTA_Key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPTA_Key
indigomm 5y ago
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.

defaulty 5y ago

> 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

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madeofpalk 5y ago
I guess that's never money that they need to pay out to anyone, so there's no difference if someone "uses" the money on the Oyster or not
- csnover 5y ago
  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. [0] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/refunds-and-replacements/oyster-pay-as-you-go-credit-no-longer-needed https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/refunds-and-replacements/oyster-pay...
  - OJFord 5y ago
    And the cards themselves are worth a £5 deposit. (Clever IMO - ever seen one littered?)
    - ldjb 5y ago
      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.
      - OJFord 5y ago

mytailorisrich 5y ago

With ubiquitous contactless payments there is no longer really a use for Oyster cards for pay-as-you-go journeys. 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.

basisword 5y ago
There’s one really good use - student discounts. 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.
andylynch 5y ago
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.
- mytailorisrich 5y ago
  "season tickets" exist and work well for tourist. Cards that allow unlimited travel for a few days. 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.

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djhworld 5y ago

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.

julianlam 5y ago
Do you know why Oyster cards are so seamless? 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...
- cbhl 5y ago
  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).
  - 5y ago

tragomaskhalos 5y ago

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.

shawabawa3 5y ago
It wasn't all for naught. That's how oyster (and now contactless payments) work
- OJFord 5y ago
  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)?
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    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.

milderworkacc 5y ago

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…)

usrnm 5y ago
If you paid for it with your credit card, then it certainly is linked to your name. And not a lot of people use cash these days
- ace2358 5y ago
  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.
  - lozf 5y ago
    > But at least my trips can’t be tracked. 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.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  It’s still nice for people who may not have (local) bank accounts, namely poor people and tourists. IIRC you can’t have a WeChat pay account without a Chinese bank account.

LatteLazy 5y ago

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).

OJFord 5y ago
Not sure what credit/fraud has to do with it, unless some how so bad someone can't have a bank account? It doesn't have to be a credit card.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  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.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Could use a pre-pay card in that first scenario. (No idea about fraudster restrictions.)
- piperswe 5y ago
  If you write enough bad checks or defraud enough banks, you can get put on a sort of banking no-fly-list

bserge 5y ago

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!

Veen 5y ago
My local bus ticket app has a rolling ball and other animations to prevent that sort of ticket forgery.
Ekaros 5y ago
I wonder if ticket inspectors can detain for fraud. Sadly probably not, so this type of behaviour won't end up in jail...
- ldjb 5y ago
  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.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  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.
- bserge 5y ago
  I had to choose between eating and paying for tickets. I paid the tickets. Ran out of money, got fined and kicked off several times until payday. 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.

gandalfian 5y ago

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?

askvictor 5y ago
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.
exporectomy 5y ago
Might be to keep fraud down since you can re-sell physical items or buy a lot of them at once, unlike transport rides.

mnd999 5y ago

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.

chris_j 5y ago

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.

mnahkies 5y ago
I generally feel much more likely to be robbed prior to entering the tube stations (eg walking under Putney bridge). 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
- pierrefermat1 5y ago
  Yes seems to make little sense to go for any robbing to occur in a high CCTV coverage area and where bystanders can easily step in.

pedrocr 5y ago

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.

gorgoiler 5y ago
How would you deal with overcrowding?
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  Few people make journeys in rush hours for the fun of it so making it free I doubt would add much crowding.
ldjb 5y ago
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.
fomine3 5y ago
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.
- ldjb 5y ago
  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.

ksec 5y ago

>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.

meibo 5y ago
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.
- marcan_42 5y ago
  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).
  - tjpnz 5y ago
    I assume your phone was sold exclusively in Japan? Foreign phones don't work with this tech.
    - fomine3 5y ago
      Now worldwide iPhone supports Suica, but don't supported by almost all Android outside Japan.

stuaxo 5y ago

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.