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Reversing UK mobile rail tickets
- nonrandomstring 4y agoNobody who cheers "mobile tickets" has ever watched a guard or ticket inspector do their job. In the UK, a guard with good eyesight and a sprightly, cheerful manner can almost run through the carriages shouting "tickets please!" and see, with a single glance, all s/he needs. Then she gets to the muppets with phones. They faff, fumble and fuss. They scowl at being interrupted watching videos, browsing social media and listening to music. They can't load their app. They huff and sigh disrespectfully. The guard can't get focus. For a moment they point phones at each other like cowboys in a gunfight standoff. She doesn't have a wifi signal, so now there's a long and embarrassing delay while passenger and guard stare at each others feet. Finally a joyful beep releases them from technological tension. Everyone in the car sighs with relief and she moves on to the next grinning smombie. The whole technology is a festering shitshow foisted on people by over-zealous tech peddlers. Paper tickets rule.
- tom_ 4y agoThis doesn't match up with my experience. The "tickets please" acts as a warning to phone-ticket users that they need to get the QR code visible. Could depend on when you travel I suppose.
- scrollaway 4y agoKids these days, how dare they use technology, am I right, fellow luddite on the internet? People lose paper tickets. People throw them on the ground. Stations are littered with them. Oh, and people do spend ages looking through their pockets, bags, coats and other places for where their paper ticket is at. You're just being contrarian because you're on a tech website, tbh.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago> littered with them. I don't see that. The ticket barriers are programmed to retain used tickets. And please lay-off the "contrarian" slurs, I'm just telling you what I see with my eyes each day. If you looked up from your phone you might notice too :)
- scrollaway 4y agoTicket barriers that swallow tickets are not universal. In many cities tickets are reusable over a long period of time and contactless. I see downvoters are happy to downvote facts, good going HN tonight.
- Symbiote 4y agoThose aren't the tickets that would be littering the ground.
- JamesMcMinn 4y agoScotRail have started to print tickets with QR codes on them, which unfortunately are an awkward size (far bigger than a credit card, even larger than a £20), come as a single strip without a perforated edge to tear, and are generally very low quality. I full expect these to become a common sight on the ground as they're not eaten by machines and difficult to store even in your wallet.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hwatson 4y agoIt’s a shame these have become more commonplace. Northern started issuing them instead of cardboard tickets a few years ago and other TOCs followed along after Network Rail/Cubic finished adding barcode readers to ~all ticket barriers. I understand why: paper barcode-only tickets are significantly cheaper than cardboard tickets (their lack of a magstripe allows any generic thermal printer to be used), but their larger form factor makes them a definite UX downgrade.
- LtWorf 4y agoIf a mobile phone is now a prerequisite for living, governments should issue them to all citizens, and provide maintenance and replacement. Or just don't expect people who don't own a phone to own a ticket.
- arp242 4y agoNot just a mobile phone, but a phone with either iOS or Android. Plus, a phone with an account with either of two parent companies (avoiding that on Android is possible, but far from trivial). Any "alternative" system is basically a non-starter as all these apps are typically only developed for these platforms, and it's become very hard for any new player to enter the market. While the duopoly is better than the monopoly of Microsoft Windows back in the day, it's also worse as the reliance on software is much greater, and its become harder (if not impossible) to write your own implementation for $alternative_system.
- lgeek 4y agoIt doesn't need to be a phone running iOS and Android, you just need an email client and a PDF viewer for UK train etickets
- intelVISA 4y agoIf that's the case they should be issued free (as in tea in the harbor) open source devices free from Apple/Google spyware for this purpose.
- scrollaway 4y agoWhat on earth is your logic there? “You have the option to send a PDF, thus I deserve a free phone of my particular choice”?
- dTal 4y agoI think the logic is you still need some sort of computer to download and display your ticket, whereas with a paper ticket you don't need any external equipment. This discriminates against those too disadvantaged to own such a thing. You can argue that if the government is going to make possession of a device a requirement to access government functions, they ought to provide it.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoPeople lose phones, or steal them, or hack them. Oh, and people do spend ages looking through their pockets, bags, coats, and other places for their phones too. But paper tickets are less likely to be hacked, and don't run out of power.
- realworldperson 4y ago[dead]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nkrisc 4y agoThe e-tickets I use on my local commuter rail are nothing like what you described. When I want to use a ticket, I activate when I get in the train and then the conductor glances at it and sees whatever they need to see. Zero difference from paper ticket. They just walk down the carriage looking at paper tickets and phones all the same.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoI'm on SWT. Where do you have ones that are eyes-on? Our guards have to do the scan-beep dance and it slows everything to a crawl.
- nkrisc 4y agoMARC, in Maryland. As I recall there is a QR code they can scan but I’ve never seen them do it. Likely just as an option if they have reason to think someone’s trying to cheat.
- IanCal 4y agoHave you ever actually been on a train in the UK? Ticket inspectors will go on to do anyone that's ready and come back - they're not bemused by someone without their ticket ready. And people constantly also fumble for their tickets then present an old ticket, then the return instead of the outgoing one, then the seat reservation not the ticket etc. My local station doesn't sell tickets. It has no office. I can buy an advance then drive miles to a totally different station to print them out or just buy it on my phone even on the way to the station and be done with it. I guarantee you buying from the ticket inspector is slower than showing them my phone.
- ghaff 4y agoI don't remember it being so bad on my last trip, but a number of years back two of us were doing a long distance walk in England. I remember train tickets being this exercise of "Which of these cards are the right ones to feed into the turnstile?" while people were piling up behind us. In general, transit systems do a pretty terrible job of usability testing for people who aren't so used to the system that it's second nature and may not even read the language.
- Symbiote 4y agoI think the "slightly easier to read" which the article refers to was done to remove the confusion of separate tickets for the journey and the reserved seat.
- Symbiote 4y agoThat ticket inspector can also turn a blind eye to invalid tickets (apply their own discretion/favours/whatever), while they'll probably need to follow the official policy with an app-based ticket scan. From the article, it seems unlikely that a data connection is required to validate a ticket, except to prevent the same ticket being shown twice to different inspectors within a short timeframe.
- OJFord 4y agoThey definitely need a data connection for a ticket sale, (but they'll go ahead and come back or whatever) I'm not sure about validating digital advance sales.
- ilammy 4y agoWhat stops the inspector from turning a blind eye to app-based tickets? If you want a true technological dystopia solution then the train car should be engineered in a way that nobody gets in or out of the car without a valid ticket. Like, make entrances a double-door, then you gotta swipe your ticket to board, deboard, go between cars while enroute, etc.
- OJFord 4y agoWeird, that's not my experience at all. I have my digital ticket ready when the guard's behind me, interrupting my video/HNing far longer than is necessary to do so, and everyone else is asking for 'X from <last station they can remember> please', cursing that this train actually had someone to call 'tickets please', as I feel like a mug for actually paying in advance every time.
- madeofpalk 4y ago> Paper tickets rule. Paper tickets suck. It's already a pain having to navigation the station to find your platform, and then add onto it trying to find a ticket machine. Make sure you get the right ticket machine because multiple train companies operate from this station! And then you have to hold on to it for the duration of your journey and not lose it, otherwise you'll face the fine.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago[flagged]
- lozenge 4y agoYou can buy any ticket from any machine, it's only the first screen that's different. If you go to type your destination then it allows you to buy any ticket.
- nly 4y agoI feel the same way about people who use mobile phone NFC payment at ticket barriers on the tube instead of a plastic cards (again via NFC) Using your phone is much slower and there's a significant chance it'll just fail and hold up the person behind you (me).
- brewdad 4y agoLast April, I did the credit card tap in NYC. Last month I was there again and tapped my iPhone and never had an issue. It felt just as fast or even faster since my phone is usually more accessible than a given card in my wallet. I wonder if the Tube’s tap in tap out setup contributes to the issues you see.
- nly 4y agoIt's not the tech per se, it's that you have to open the app or at least unlock the phone (whichever it is), and people are more cautious with their phones compared to a card. They also tend to watch the screen instead of where they're going. I can slap down my card with my arm outstretched, without breaking my stride, and before I hit the barrier it opens. Observe a phone user in a London rush hour and it causes a noticeable backlog at gates
- kamilner 4y agoYou neither need an app nor do you need to unlock your phone in order to use it for the ticket gates on the tube. Perhaps older phones need to be unlocked? I use my phone exclusively without unlocking it and there's no delay.
- djhworld 4y agoThat hasn't been my experience at all, at least in London, UK. There used to be a time where the oyster card was slightly faster than the phone in terms of registering at the barrier but that's improved a lot over time. I don't live in London anymore but when I've visited it's been so good just tapping your phone through everything. Additionally the hold ups at the barriers in my experience are more down to people's misunderstanding of the cadence required between each passenger. This applies to both oyster/card and phone, and is more of a UX problem of the barrier rather than the technology used to activate it
- jonathantf2 4y agoPaper tickets are an absolute pain - I hate having to fumble around trying to find them, instead of just double clicking the power button and bringing up my Wallet. I've only ever had it checked by the barriers, I can't remember the last time I saw a conductor checking tickets on a train.
- stevekemp 4y agoSome stations don't have barriers, which seems to correlate with tickets being checked on those routes more frequently. (e.g. York, or Edinburgh.)
- rippercushions 4y agoI went to an exhibition at a museum today. There's a distance of maybe 5 meters between the ticket office and the exhibition entrance. Instead of getting a paper ticket and handing it over at the gate, I had to tell the clerk my phone number, wait a few moments to receive one SMS for each person, click on a link in each SMS to retrieve a separate per-person QR code that could be scanned at the gate, and then click back and repeat individually for everybody in my group. Such efficiency!
- dTal 4y agoYes, they efficiently extracted your phone number.
- SCdF 4y agoThis has not been my experience of digital vs paper tickets in any country at any point, the UK included. And I don't mean it mostly doesn't happen, I don't think I've ever particularly noticed an instance of drama created through tickets being digital specifically.
- sschueller 4y agoThis was an issue in Switzerland initially with the introduction of the SwissPass (very ugly looking thing, at least the new one looks a bit better [1]) which no longer showed what it was (the old Abonement cards where translucent [2]) but was a card with a photo on it and you would have a ticket connected to that card which the conductor could check with their smartphones either via NFC or the qr-code on the back. The Samsung phones that where issues where slow to scan the cards via NFC. Today you can also have everything on your phone which then gets scanned withe QR-Code. BTW, this code changes every few seconds so screenshots don't work. You can also instead of purchasing a ticket do something that is called "check-in" where you check-in before you get on the train and a GPS type ticket is issues. At the end of the day the best possible rate for you is then calculated and your are billed. Downside is, you need to be "tracked" by the train company for this to work. However the process to inspect tickets is again as fast or faster than it was before. In fact when someone has paper tickets (specifically papers from non-Swiss ticket offices (France, Italy etc.)) it can take longer. There is also a rule if you can't present your ticket in a timely manner it's considered invalid. This never happens but when the conductor yells tickets please, get your phone out. [1] https://www.swisspass.ch/new-swisspass?lang=en https://www.swisspass.ch/new-swisspass?lang=en [2] https://hymnos.existenz.ch/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/DSC03715.jpg https://hymnos.existenz.ch/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/DSC037...
- switch007 4y ago> Nowadays, the industry would very much like you to ditch your paper ticket in favour of a fancy mobile barcode one (or an ITSO smartcard2); not only do they not have to spend money on printing tickets but they also gain the ability to more precisely track the ticket’s usage across the network and minimise fraud. And unsurprisingly only a subset of tickets are available on the apps. Therefore the government gets its “fare simplification” it’s so badly wanted, through the back door, in a sense, the harder it pushes mobile tickets Eg rover tickets are not on the ticketing apps. These can be excellent value. Edit: also the government very recently announced [0] they are to scrap return fares. This will without a shadow of doubt increase prices for a great many journeys. [0] https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/end-of-the-line-for-return-rail-tickets.242970/ https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/end-of-the-line-for-ret...
- AmericanChopper 4y agoI don’t know if they do this in the UK, but using apps also gives the government the ability to profit from breakage the same way gift card programs do. The last time I had a public transport app I had to maintain a balance that could expire. The place that implemented this system also prohibited all other forms of payment as a Covid measure, and for some reason hasn’t reverted that policy yet.
- Symbiote 4y agoIn London you can use a normal contactless debit or credit card or NFC payment on a phone for public transport. This is great for Londoners, and even better for visitors who don't need to figure out what they need to buy or how to top up a card. I don't belive the ticket apps being discussed keep a balance, but I haven't used them myself.
- AmericanChopper 4y agoI’ve seen that system in quite a few cities now. I’m was initially surprised to see it adopted, because breakage revenue can be enormous. But it’s common enough now that I find places using exclusively the old stored value cards to be outright contemptible.
- timthorn 4y agoThe photo of a UK train ticket is very interesting. Reading Green Park station isn't yet open, AFAIK: https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations/RGP/details.html https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations/RGP/details.html
- Symbiote 4y agoI'd guess you've discovered the train nerd Easter egg of the article.
- nly 4y agoThe price on the ticket is also £1.90M
- arp242 4y agoIt usually has an "X" suffix. I'm not sure what the "M" stands for; maybe to mark it as a specimen?
- michaelhoffman 4y agoX means you paid with a credit card. M means you paid with cash ("money").
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- odiroot 4y agoWhich is weird because the minimal fare is £2.20 now.
- turnerc 4y agoI believe the minimum fare is the price before any discounts applied, a railcard on 1.90 would be a normal price of ~£2.84
- NoZebra120vClip 4y agoDuring the COVID outbreak, my public transit provider began to neglect their fareboxes (partly because everyone was boarding in the rear and didn't bother to pay fares anyway.) I noticed that the boxes were still broken and unmaintained. I put 2 and 2 together and realized that a mobile "upgrade" was coming soon, so I kept my eyes out. And sure enough, I got myself invited to participate in the pilot project with the upgraded app. The deadlines slipped twice but the pilot began in mid-January. So far I have not had glitches with scanning or boarding. But let me tell you. There are disclaimers in the FAQ. Since the mobile passes are QR-based and not NFC, they absolutely require WAN connectivity on both sides in order to activate a pass. My initial testing indicated that a loss of connectivity will not invalidate an active pass, because it's endowed with a built-in expiration countdown. But we shall see. The FAQ also says straight out, of course, that the customer must keep the phone charged in order to use the pass. Of course it goes without saying that your phone must be functional in order to scan the thing. So that's a whole tech stack that could go awry and strand you if you don't take precautions. Hey, this may reduce fraud and friction at the farebox. I don't know. Many people will love not having another thing to lose or the convenience of purchasing passes without going somewhere (they cost way more on board a bus.) But the Luddite in me doesn't want this. I'd much rather carry around an old reliable paper-based pass, and I will go back to that for as long as I can get away with it. But I won't turn down a $75 gift card to play along with the pilot test.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago> Of course it goes without saying that your phone must be functional in order to scan the thing. So that's a whole tech stack that could go awry and strand you if you don't take precautions It could go awry if Google fucked up, Samsung/phone manufacturer fucks up, battery or charger fucks up, software developer fucks up, internet, etc, etc. we are replacing reliable sustems with fragile ones everywhere
- LtWorf 4y agoIn sweden Coop supermarkets were closed for a weekend because they rely on some cloud thingy from USA that had gotten a ransomware. It was their billing system, you couldn't pay cash, they had no way to record it.
- tsujamin 4y agoThe bit at the end regarding the unauthenticated anti-fraud database of trips reminds me of bus tickets in a couple of australian states, which (locally on the 13MHz MFC cards) store a short rolling log of your most recent trips. Not as bad as a public API, but probably some degree of a personal safety risk given the security around MFC cards and the ability to ascertain pattern-of-life from the data
- lawgimenez 4y agoLast Covid, I did the same reverse engineering our government's Covid app and found out that the API keys (public and private) were hardcoded in the source code. Never got any response. Edit: Emphasized public and private keys
- xkcd1963 4y agoCoincidentally I started scanning Sao Paulo metro ticket QR codes (if someone feels like reversing it) <q:01> s:196;u:296101284;i:14;c:JP4igg/YIyk03lYqnVcjFCQjDldUc7Th82Gjppb89S8I0vlCNIAYpzBgUESmeKmaaf2BHvlkuyd3opXXwEWsujuGqqakb09xrYWVlBeqY97qfwE1bynzs9FbGmG6HxnVmpM6AHROTBZa08ti/0KiR1oyKpZkrucBE9dJsJtz0qg=;x:49; <q:01> s:196;u:297172367;i:14;c:pirqKynzF6wa7ttQJRtw8B5SfcQiWL5psEwju5OVjxLwG7hZKgJsii381A0l9hzcxsebxUJrK6Z1ZX22ILd/AMYOSx2DuQ2OHqrP5r8sNuVfMATrYOTbcioISrn/dBLN1vaQxEmZkTxLkE9837NGvsrlP7mF+BWYps3jqA/MfG0=;x:25;
- renewiltord 4y agoNice stuff. As a user, this stuff is way simpler. I buy the ticket on train line and get a qr code that scans and I'm on the train.
- josephcsible 4y ago> (“But wait,” I hear you cry, “isn’t getting a persistent device ID exactly what Apple don’t want you to do?” And you’d be right! Technically, I believe the device UUID actually does change between installs, but they store a copy in the device keychain, which doesn’t get wiped when you remove the app. This is stupid, and almost certainly a contravention of App Store policy.) More proof that Apple's walled garden is a scam: it fails to protect against the thing that its alleged purpose of existence is to protect against.
- TobyTheDog123 4y agoThis reminds me of the time when I was a college student in Massachusetts and would always try to reverse-engineer the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority tickets, powered by JustRide (oh! Just noticed it's the same company as in the article) Unfortunately, my skills weren't quite there at that point in my life, and I no longer live in Massachusetts, but this was an incredible read regardless and I feel at least a bit of closure now :) The MBTA tickets had an option of color bars (so the conductors could just visually check if all of them match throughout all the passengers) and a QR option, so I would always try to figure out how it generates those colors, as the tickets had to be able to function offline, and as the tickets all showed the same colors regardless of passenger, they certainly weren't unique per-purchase nor used any user-unique info (though they may have been unique per-train-route). I should take another look at it with this article as a resource.
- jasonjayr 4y agoI think the tickets had to be activated 'online', and iirc they are good for 60 minutes. Additionally the color bar screen has an animated timestamp too, presumably to prevent a (basic) screenshot attack. And; although I've never had it scanned, I think if the ticket checker suspects something is up, they scan the qrcode for an online verification. I took a large family group with me on one ride, and they did consistently check that I activated the right number of tickets.
- fuzzfactor 4y agoOn the Florida Turnpike it was always too expensive for many students when they traveled up and down the state. It was bad enough having captive service stations and restaurants for overpriced products, but the toll was and still is ridiculous too, considering it was agreed there would be no toll after the construction was paid for, And it was well paid for decades ago. Anyway there were only very few exits and they were mostly rural until you got to South Florida where you could get off and on every few miles. The captive service stations needeed to be built at the same time as the Turnpike or everybody would run out of gas back then. Except Orlando which was a very small city before Disney came in, but their gas stations were still closed late at night and on Sunday. Tickets were reverse engineered in a completely analog way. The "main entrance" to the Turnpike coming south was out in the middle of nowhere where the I-75 freeway keeps going to Tampa but you smoothly get over to the main gates of the Turnpike if you want to head down to Miami instead. You would just breeze on through and pick up a ticket at the northernmost gate, and the further you traveled south, the more toll you would have to pay when you got off. Students would get off of I-75 avoiding the Turnpike and drive on the rural roads about a half-hour until you get to the next Turnpike entrance and pick up a (very valuable) ticket there instead of at the main entrance to the north. As you got down toward the Palm Beach area, where the northbounders and southbounders still shared the gas stations and restaurants in the central plazas, many northbound travelers would willingly trade tickets from wherever they got on in South Florida for one which will only cost them as much as if they got on at the very last chance before hitting the northernmost exit. Northbounders would then get off right where they were going to anyway, one exit away from where we got on, and we would get off one exit away from where they got on, and everybody came out ahead, paying the minimum tolls possible. It took a long time before any toll-takers started looking at the tickets and asking "why did it take 6 hours to only go one exit?"
- reustle 4y agoI used to live in the US and currently live in Japan. We pay around $95 to go about 5 hours on a highway from Tokyo to Kyoto, for example. 3~ hours north is about $35. I think this more accurately charges us drivers for the resources we consume.
- iudqnolq 4y agoThey invented a clever decentralized system based on public key cryptography, but it seems like they actually need centralized features. So they bolted some on, leaving an end result worse off than if they'd started with something simple and centralized. For example, you can ask any UK rail operator to book you a trip that includes sections run by other operators. So your purchase needs to be fed through a centralized revenue-splitting system (called LENNON iirc) anyway. Then they got the feature request that you should be able to book specific seats and someone else shouldn't be able to book the same seat, and so on. This just can't be decentralized. This setup does have the advantage that they can check tickets without needing a network connection, but I'd guess there would be simpler ways to add that to a centralized system.
- bombcar 4y agoYou could in theory make it decentralized-ish depending on the requirements. For example they could allocate blocks of seats to vendors and if you bought one of those seats you could buy it “offline” to be synced later. But it’s probably not worth the hassle and once the ticket is sold you can have it be signed by the centralized system so you can verify the signature offline easily.
- iudqnolq 4y agoI don't think that theory works out in practice because they have not that many seats in the trains, a lot of vendors, vendors that book very small and irregular numbers of tickets on routes, and sometimes very few or no extra seats. So you'd need to reallocate the blocks by demand quite frequently, at which point it's morally a shitty centralized system. And with every clever decentralized solution there's another feature request that adds more complexity. I just remembered some trains have displays above seats that tell you if it's reserved.
- krisoft 4y ago> So they bolted some on, leaving an end result worse off than if they'd started with something simple and centralized. I disagree. > This setup does have the advantage that they can check tickets without needing a network connection This is the most important reason why it is implemented this way. Checking happens on rowing handheld devices which have frequently no good internet connection. Even in the turnstiles where you would think they could afford a reliable connection if said connection goes down you can’t block the flow of people. Reliability and speed of checking was clearly the most important features they optimised for. Security, in the sense that passengers can’t just mint tickets for themselces, is a close second. The beauty is that every centralised reporting can be deffered. In case the centralised database is down, or the checker’s network is down, you just store the timestamp and the signed ticket data and report it once things are working again. The centralised system doesn’t even need to trust the checker computers. Railway company A cannot mint a ticket from railway company B. They don’t have the keys to do that. So they cannot fraudelently divert revenue from each other. Neither accidentally nor intentionally. > but I'd guess there would be simpler ways to add that to a centralized system. I’m all ears. How would you do it simpler?
- qrt 4y agoif you reverse the domain of this website, you get "state" :)
- jrockway 4y agoThey seem to have removed the device "abc" from being allowed to download keys, or that was an "obviously fake" device id for the article: > $ curl -s 'https://device.theticketkeeper.com/download_keys?device_name=abc' | jq > { > "return_code": "error", > "message": "Device not registered." > }
- arnon 4y agoVery nicely written, it made it very accessible to those who aren't super familiar with reverse engineering. I'm fascinated by "transport billing" - it's such a complex problem, owing to the different infrastructure providers, different operators, fares, holidays, special events, and weird edge-case situations.
- japanman425 4y agoOkay very good but why bother?
- michaelt 4y ago> they also gain the ability to more precisely track the ticket’s usage across the network and minimise fraud. Except mobile tickets make fraud trivial - getting off the train without a ticket, at a station with a ticket barrier? Just show them your powered off phone and say 'my phone died' and they'll let you out, no questions asked.
- Shaanie 4y agoSure, but presumably because it's not worth the effort to verify rather than an inability to do so, no? If their priorities change, claiming your phone is out of battery seems unlikely to allow you to avoid a fine.
- nly 4y agoExactly. It's not like with paper tickets it was any different. If you lost your paper ticket they would either shrug and let you out, or fine you on the spot and let you cancel the fine if you can find and produce the lost ticket later. Of course, I suppose in 2023 you can always say you have no way to pay the fine without your phone...
- lozenge 4y agoDo that five days a week and they will start recognising you!
- nprateem 4y agoIt's your responsibility to produce a ticket. Claiming your dog ate it or whatever will just mean they make you buy a new ticket and apply for a refund if you find your original again. They've heard these things before.
- michaelt 4y agoSo you say - but I've repeatedly seen people allowed to exit through the ticket barriers at my local train station with nothing but a powered off phone as a 'ticket'
- grahar64 4y agoSuch a good read.
- nly 4y agoThe fact that there's a gender field on the ticket is interesting.
- lol768 4y agoIt's unused in reality.
- tescocles 4y agoOne might assume it's forward thinking - if this were used in Japan, where there are woman-only carriages, this might be relevant.
- nly 4y agoThere should never be a need for this and the fact that they exist is sad.
- implements 4y agoSometimes people give one-day unlimited travel tickets they no longer need to other passengers as they leave the station, which is at least against the terms of issue if not actually illegal. I guess having a sex / gender field makes that kind of re-use slightly harder?
- switch007 4y agoWhich part of the National Rail Conditions of Travel is that against? Edit: section 5.1.2
- usr1106 4y agoIt might be needed for night trains (sleepers). Before COVID-19 in Finland you could reserve a single bed for women or men, which meant your share the compartment with a stranger of the same sex. A model which of course assumed sex is strictly binary and having strangers of opposite sex in the same compartment is problematic, while having strangers of the same sex is unproblematic.
- emj 4y agoI highly recommend Harley Watsons talk (_unlobito) about ITSO and footnotes on Oyster card. https://lobi.to/talks/papertickets/ https://lobi.to/talks/papertickets/ that talk is also referenced in this article, a truly wonderful presenter.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]