17 ms·

To peoples asking: "Why not just QR codes?" Again it's all about latency. QR codes take longer when you tap them at the gate: opening the app, waiting for the s

To peoples asking: "Why not just QR codes?" Again it's all about latency. QR codes take longer when you tap them at the gate: opening the app, waiting for the scanner to adjust, connecting to inet. While NFC handle these tasks almost instantly. A big difference in super busy places where queues are a nightmare. Again, this problem wouldn't exist if we can optimize WFH methods. We don't need to solving "physical problems" from start to finish. Making, distributing, and recycling all those ticket papers. No matter how advanced your transportation tech is, moving people long distances is still really costly. Sorry to "steer" this conversation into WFH and WFO topics.

BOOSTERHIDROGEN 2y ago
https://atadistance.net/2024/05/31/jr-east-and-tokyo-private-rail-lines-agree-to-replace-mag-strip-paper-tickets-with-qr-starting-in-2026/ https://atadistance.net/2024/05/31/jr-east-and-tokyo-private...
asah 2y ago
1000s of people leaving a stadium faces the same latency: not a WFH/WFO issue
- solarized 2y ago
  Haha, absolutely! Just to generalize, those thousands of people can also watch the match by streaming, right? It's all about remote versus physical activities. We can't shift everything into remote mode. However, we don't need to hustle into physical mode every day either. Yeah, yin yang complexity, balancing everything out.
  - zuppy 2y ago
    i’m not a sports fan, but the feeling of being there can’t be compared to watching the event from home. this is not the part to optimize, in my opinion.
- fennecfoxy 2y ago
  Not really a comparable thing versus the morning/evening rush every single weekday when forcing people in-office. It's the scale that makes it an issue, 1000s of people is nothing and more of an occasional spike. See how London deals with toob stations for pride, for example, by closing and controlling some, exit only periods close to the event, open ticket gates, etc.
- bluGill 2y ago
  That latency is time stolen from the other people who are already on transit (or waiting in line to get on) who get there later. All this latency is the type of thing that makes people want to quit using transit and just get a car. (and then build more roads to deal with congestion - though road users often have more options to avoid this latency and overall generally go faster than transit despite the congestion - remember it is end to end trip time that matters not time to get through a bottleneck)
scoot 2y ago
The UK rail network already supports QR codes, with the busiest station handling over 80M entries/exits per year. Meanwhile, the integrated subway/overground/bus network in London supports direct payment with NFC smartphones, without the need for an intermediate "smart" paper ticket; the infrastructure for vending those; or the (not insignificant) cost of producing the tickets. Not sure what Montreal was thinking!
- PaulRobinson 2y ago
  Even better, London doesn’t need NFC smartphones: if you have a chip bank card with a chip for tap payments, just tap that. For those of us with smart watches, they do the metro fast pay thing as well, so I literally just tap my watch without having to press anything or get anything out of my pocket. If my watch battery is dead, I can just a bank card. The only advantage to having Oyster is if you’re travelling enough to justify a monthly pass (daily and weekly caps are respected on bank card taps), or longer. I travel a lot across North America and EMEA, always glad to get home and deal with London’s transport network: it’s the only one that is really designed around, built for and feels invested in the passenger experience.
  - scoot 2y ago
    Good point, the choices are: smartphone, smart watch, physical bank card (credit or debit), and pre-paid "Oyster" card (think pre-paid debit card specific to the London public transport network), and, yes, legacy paper mag-stripe tickets.
BiteCode_dev 2y ago
I can't see big technical limitations resulting in slow QRCode scanning. We manage to detect fast cars going 120mph to fine them, we can read fingerprints instantly through a screen. We can take pictures of galaxies light years away. 30 years ago you could kill ducks with the NES guns instantly and it worked by detecting pixels. I'm sure we can figure out how to analyze black squares and turn them into a number under 50ms.
- sippeangelo 2y ago
  The Stockholm Metro and public transport uses QRs, but on phones, and it's awful. The huge variance in people's shitty broken, dim phones make it take 3-4 tries sometimes. Infuriating! The scanners themselves are brilliant though, but nobody wants to stand in line for some printer machine and need to carry a flimsy bit of paper around.
  - sleepydog 2y ago
    When I was there they also had NFC readers you can tap your credit card or phone on.
  - BiteCode_dev 2y ago
    The article talks about tickets with chips in it, which means you could provide the same ticket with qr code, only cheaper and less polluting. No variance. People can then use nfc with their phone, which doesn't have the pollution problem.
- delfinom 2y ago
  Lol, that's the joke. QR Codes were invented by Denso (automaker own) / Toyota. For high speed assembly line processes. Lul.
  - BiteCode_dev 2y ago
    In 1994, no less. I don't think people realize how limited the hardware was at the time. They think because their phone is slow at scanning QR codes, that's how it must be. But the phone is not a dedicated device for QRCode scanning. It's like someone saying they get blurry pics of cars on the highway so clearly speed limits are not possible to check automatically.
altacc 2y ago
In some places, like Oslo's metro, tram & bus systems, the solution is that there are no ticket barriers, you're trusted to have bought a ticket for your journey. There are occasional ticket checks with big fines for non-compliance.
- solarized 2y ago
  Interesting! It's a good way to test how successful the city is with their education systems. We could try it out one day a year at least. Differentiate nomal daily sales rates within the test day, observe the trend year by year. Sounds naive, would be lovely if it works.
  - Piskvorrr 2y ago
    There was a push for a gated system here, some years ago. The vendor tried to sell it on massive cost savings...and was publicly humiliated by a bunch of geeks with an Excel table. Turns out, installing and running the gates would, at best, bring parity with random ticket inspections+fines - while impeding passenger flow as a bonus. It's not necessarily a matter of education: just the feeling of "not worth freeloading (at the price), I'm likely to get caught anyway" is sufficient.
- joenot443 2y ago
  Most North American cities sadly don’t operate at the level of trust required for a system like that to work, as much as I agree it would be better for everyone.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    san francisco operates at the level of IDGAF that allows people of all income to ride buses and trams without a ticket
    - itsoktocry 2y ago
      Yes, and they have a nearly-$1 billion budget deficit.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
a-dub 2y ago
NYC OMNY allows for direct payment from a debit/credit card via NFC at the turnstile. this has privacy issues but i think they're ameliorated if you use a smartphone. i think you can buy a transit payment card if you need one. no paper tickets. cool ephemera but pretty wasteful. would be pretty cool if/when we see a day where provably private cryptocurrency microtransactions allow for both real privacy and the 7 day fare cap feature.
- delfinom 2y ago
  Crypto isn't private as traceability is an inherent requirement for crypto to operate. Anyway with OMNY. You just buy a OMNY card and load it with cash if you want privacy. They are being slow to roll the vending machines for these out due to vendor issues but it's growing and they can't discontinue the MetroCard until they have all the vending machines in place.
  - a-dub 2y ago
    > Crypto isn't private as traceability is an inherent requirement for crypto to operate. monero is a counterexample to this. i wonder how many organizations that do payroll see a timestamp and location when you tap a credit card at an omny reader? maybe it's fine and can be solved with regulation, but honestly it seems a little not great.
- jasonkester 2y ago
  I like London’s version of this. You can just tap your credit card or phone at any station, and it will even stop charging you after you rack up £8 in payments over the course of a day. Just pretends you had bought a day pass in the first place. Really leaves a good impression, knowing that they could have gouged you but chose not to.
  - anamexis 2y ago
    New York also does this, except weekly. https://omny.info/fares https://omny.info/fares
  - 2y ago
Delk 2y ago
I'm not sure that necessarily explains the need for single-use NFC tickets, though. There could be a more durable serial-use or permanent card with NFC that regular commuters could buy, and if those commuters are the vast majority of rush hour passengers, it might not be such a problem if single-use tickets had a slightly slower system. Of course that'd mean having two recognition mechanisms, so the operator might opt for NFC and chips for single-use tickets anyway to make the system simpler. But somehow having single-use tickets with chips on them does seem wasteful to me.
- videogreg93 2y ago
  Can confirm that in Montreal there is a permanent version of this card (la carte OPUS) on which you can reload more tickets. There are even semi permanent ones you can buy, which are good for say 1 day, 1 weekend, or contain 10 passes.
- xmcqdpt2 2y ago
  We have those, with two recognition systems. The system the article describes is for the low count, disposable fares (a few tickets or a 3 day pass). Most people in Montreal have a chip card (the OPUS) which is reusable (and 5$ to buy). The OPUS is also super interesting because it's a stored value card that holds the tokens on the card as opposed to a simple ID. The system was developed when cellular connectivity was still spotty, so they needed a card that would work on buses without internet access. It's pretty bad from a UX point of view though: you can only store a few different kind of fares, you can't recharge the card online (until recently you had to go to a terminal to do it, now there is a NFC phone app), you can't declare a card stolen, etc.
  - Delk 2y ago
    Ok, that makes sense then. I know that systems with non-disposable cards exist, and we also have one in the Helsinki metro area. I think our present system assumes continuous connectivity, though. Now and then you see buses with the terminal in a non-functioning state. Ends up being a free ride. (You can also buy unlimited travel within a given zone for x days at a time, which is what those who use public transit daily usually get.) I think most people nowadays use a phone app rather than the card, though. But we also don't have gates at stations, and it's more of a trust and ticket inspections system similarly to what someone said about Norway. Japan has the Pasmo system which is weird in that it's actually more like a prepaid debit-style card that you can use not only on most public transit but also as a payment method at some shops etc. You can charge it using teller machines at stations. I can't remember the details, though.
woodruffw 2y ago
Why would a QR code require Internet, or an app? You could just print it on paper and track the corresponding balance on the server side. To my understanding this is what most transit networks do anyways, to prevent an enterprising user from modifying their balance on the card itself. (The optical scanning argument makes sense, however.)
- lucianbr 2y ago
  Internet is how you get from the client side to the server side. Maybe not internet but some-kind-of-net, and that has latency, failures etc. Maybe that's not clear: the turnstile needs to connect to a server to check the QR. Need to only have one server, so some turnstiles will be relatively far from it. Latency.
  - woodruffw 2y ago
    > Maybe that's not clear: the turnstile needs to connect to a server to check the QR. Need to only have one server, so some turnstiles will be relatively far from it. Latency. Sure, but is this a serious design pressure? I've been on a lot of EU train and trolley networks that have a POS terminal on the train for direct sales, which are already doing networking both for the card transaction and to issue the ticket. (Again to be clear: I'm not saying a QR is better. But I don't think connectivity is a unique problem, since systems that use NFC without tying into payment cards are almost certainly using connectivity to make up for the lack of tamper resistance.)
- grishka 2y ago
  Even for single-use tickets, the turnstiles on the entire system need to somehow know that you've used your QR code the moment you did it. This requires them all to be connected to some sort of central server. There's a reason why single-use tickets either somehow store the validation mark on the ticket itself (NFC, magnetic stripe, paper that you have to stamp) or get taken away from you (tokens). > To my understanding this is what most transit networks do anyways, to prevent an enterprising user from modifying their balance on the card itself. On those on which this was attempted that I know of, this synchronization is far from instant. I was wrong in my other comment, in St Petersburg metro it only takes two hours for a dumped and restored card to be blocked, but you can apparently do this indefinitely on buses and trams because they aren't (weren't?) networked: https://web.archive.org/web/20170323213524/https://habrahabr.ru/post/324040/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170323213524/https://habrahabr...
gylterud 2y ago
I would like to point out that there is an implicit assumption here that we actually need a ticket system for public transport. The general concept is “the cost of the price”. Which is something to consider for public goods. If the prices would be zero, the cost of a ticket system would also be zero.
- devmor 2y ago
  It's kind of silly how contentious this subject is. The majority opinion is that we all pay for public works projects even if they don't benefit us, but for some reason, transit must be self-funded. It's odd, to say the least.
  - kergonath 2y ago
    It makes sense if enough people with influence over lawmaking and government have a vested interest in benefiting from “free” infrastructure and some level of friction to use public transit. Add a pinch of “public transit is useless anyway, I have a chauffeur” and here you are. It is completely counter-productive and damaging to the economy and the environment, but it is not that odd, unfortunately.
- steelbrain 2y ago
  FWIW, even in places like Estonia, which has a free public transport (bus only?) system, the tickets are still sold/used/checked. Reportedly to get usage numbers and to cost-optimize the routes. Each resident/citizen can buy a public transport card, then tie it to their Gov ID and then tap it everywhere. You could argue that this could be replaced by some vision tech but I guess this is simpler and has dual use (visitors can purchase the card and pay instead of using for free).
cavisne 2y ago
I ran into this in France, where the ticket station used QR codes & NFC. The QR code readers are scratched up meaning printed copies without backlight didn’t work. And iPhone opens Apple wallet when you bring it near a NFC reader, hiding the QR code on your screen.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

BOOSTERHIDROGEN 2y ago

https://atadistance.net/2024/05/31/jr-east-and-tokyo-private-rail-lines-agree-to-replace-mag-strip-paper-tickets-with-qr-starting-in-2026/ https://atadistance.net/2024/05/31/jr-east-and-tokyo-private...

asah 2y ago

1000s of people leaving a stadium faces the same latency: not a WFH/WFO issue

solarized 2y ago
Haha, absolutely! Just to generalize, those thousands of people can also watch the match by streaming, right? It's all about remote versus physical activities. We can't shift everything into remote mode. However, we don't need to hustle into physical mode every day either. Yeah, yin yang complexity, balancing everything out.
- zuppy 2y ago
  i’m not a sports fan, but the feeling of being there can’t be compared to watching the event from home. this is not the part to optimize, in my opinion.
fennecfoxy 2y ago
Not really a comparable thing versus the morning/evening rush every single weekday when forcing people in-office. It's the scale that makes it an issue, 1000s of people is nothing and more of an occasional spike. See how London deals with toob stations for pride, for example, by closing and controlling some, exit only periods close to the event, open ticket gates, etc.
bluGill 2y ago
That latency is time stolen from the other people who are already on transit (or waiting in line to get on) who get there later. All this latency is the type of thing that makes people want to quit using transit and just get a car. (and then build more roads to deal with congestion - though road users often have more options to avoid this latency and overall generally go faster than transit despite the congestion - remember it is end to end trip time that matters not time to get through a bottleneck)

scoot 2y ago

The UK rail network already supports QR codes, with the busiest station handling over 80M entries/exits per year. Meanwhile, the integrated subway/overground/bus network in London supports direct payment with NFC smartphones, without the need for an intermediate "smart" paper ticket; the infrastructure for vending those; or the (not insignificant) cost of producing the tickets. Not sure what Montreal was thinking!

PaulRobinson 2y ago
Even better, London doesn’t need NFC smartphones: if you have a chip bank card with a chip for tap payments, just tap that. For those of us with smart watches, they do the metro fast pay thing as well, so I literally just tap my watch without having to press anything or get anything out of my pocket. If my watch battery is dead, I can just a bank card. The only advantage to having Oyster is if you’re travelling enough to justify a monthly pass (daily and weekly caps are respected on bank card taps), or longer. I travel a lot across North America and EMEA, always glad to get home and deal with London’s transport network: it’s the only one that is really designed around, built for and feels invested in the passenger experience.
- scoot 2y ago
  Good point, the choices are: smartphone, smart watch, physical bank card (credit or debit), and pre-paid "Oyster" card (think pre-paid debit card specific to the London public transport network), and, yes, legacy paper mag-stripe tickets.

BiteCode_dev 2y ago

I can't see big technical limitations resulting in slow QRCode scanning. We manage to detect fast cars going 120mph to fine them, we can read fingerprints instantly through a screen. We can take pictures of galaxies light years away. 30 years ago you could kill ducks with the NES guns instantly and it worked by detecting pixels. I'm sure we can figure out how to analyze black squares and turn them into a number under 50ms.

sippeangelo 2y ago
The Stockholm Metro and public transport uses QRs, but on phones, and it's awful. The huge variance in people's shitty broken, dim phones make it take 3-4 tries sometimes. Infuriating! The scanners themselves are brilliant though, but nobody wants to stand in line for some printer machine and need to carry a flimsy bit of paper around.
- sleepydog 2y ago
  When I was there they also had NFC readers you can tap your credit card or phone on.
- BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  The article talks about tickets with chips in it, which means you could provide the same ticket with qr code, only cheaper and less polluting. No variance. People can then use nfc with their phone, which doesn't have the pollution problem.
delfinom 2y ago
Lol, that's the joke. QR Codes were invented by Denso (automaker own) / Toyota. For high speed assembly line processes. Lul.
- BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  In 1994, no less. I don't think people realize how limited the hardware was at the time. They think because their phone is slow at scanning QR codes, that's how it must be. But the phone is not a dedicated device for QRCode scanning. It's like someone saying they get blurry pics of cars on the highway so clearly speed limits are not possible to check automatically.

altacc 2y ago

In some places, like Oslo's metro, tram & bus systems, the solution is that there are no ticket barriers, you're trusted to have bought a ticket for your journey. There are occasional ticket checks with big fines for non-compliance.

solarized 2y ago
Interesting! It's a good way to test how successful the city is with their education systems. We could try it out one day a year at least. Differentiate nomal daily sales rates within the test day, observe the trend year by year. Sounds naive, would be lovely if it works.
- Piskvorrr 2y ago
  There was a push for a gated system here, some years ago. The vendor tried to sell it on massive cost savings...and was publicly humiliated by a bunch of geeks with an Excel table. Turns out, installing and running the gates would, at best, bring parity with random ticket inspections+fines - while impeding passenger flow as a bonus. It's not necessarily a matter of education: just the feeling of "not worth freeloading (at the price), I'm likely to get caught anyway" is sufficient.
joenot443 2y ago
Most North American cities sadly don’t operate at the level of trust required for a system like that to work, as much as I agree it would be better for everyone.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  san francisco operates at the level of IDGAF that allows people of all income to ride buses and trams without a ticket
  - itsoktocry 2y ago
    Yes, and they have a nearly-$1 billion budget deficit.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

a-dub 2y ago

NYC OMNY allows for direct payment from a debit/credit card via NFC at the turnstile. this has privacy issues but i think they're ameliorated if you use a smartphone. i think you can buy a transit payment card if you need one. no paper tickets. cool ephemera but pretty wasteful. would be pretty cool if/when we see a day where provably private cryptocurrency microtransactions allow for both real privacy and the 7 day fare cap feature.

delfinom 2y ago
Crypto isn't private as traceability is an inherent requirement for crypto to operate. Anyway with OMNY. You just buy a OMNY card and load it with cash if you want privacy. They are being slow to roll the vending machines for these out due to vendor issues but it's growing and they can't discontinue the MetroCard until they have all the vending machines in place.
- a-dub 2y ago
  > Crypto isn't private as traceability is an inherent requirement for crypto to operate. monero is a counterexample to this. i wonder how many organizations that do payroll see a timestamp and location when you tap a credit card at an omny reader? maybe it's fine and can be solved with regulation, but honestly it seems a little not great.
jasonkester 2y ago
I like London’s version of this. You can just tap your credit card or phone at any station, and it will even stop charging you after you rack up £8 in payments over the course of a day. Just pretends you had bought a day pass in the first place. Really leaves a good impression, knowing that they could have gouged you but chose not to.
- anamexis 2y ago
  New York also does this, except weekly. https://omny.info/fares https://omny.info/fares
- 2y ago

Delk 2y ago

I'm not sure that necessarily explains the need for single-use NFC tickets, though. There could be a more durable serial-use or permanent card with NFC that regular commuters could buy, and if those commuters are the vast majority of rush hour passengers, it might not be such a problem if single-use tickets had a slightly slower system. Of course that'd mean having two recognition mechanisms, so the operator might opt for NFC and chips for single-use tickets anyway to make the system simpler. But somehow having single-use tickets with chips on them does seem wasteful to me.

videogreg93 2y ago
Can confirm that in Montreal there is a permanent version of this card (la carte OPUS) on which you can reload more tickets. There are even semi permanent ones you can buy, which are good for say 1 day, 1 weekend, or contain 10 passes.
xmcqdpt2 2y ago
We have those, with two recognition systems. The system the article describes is for the low count, disposable fares (a few tickets or a 3 day pass). Most people in Montreal have a chip card (the OPUS) which is reusable (and 5$ to buy). The OPUS is also super interesting because it's a stored value card that holds the tokens on the card as opposed to a simple ID. The system was developed when cellular connectivity was still spotty, so they needed a card that would work on buses without internet access. It's pretty bad from a UX point of view though: you can only store a few different kind of fares, you can't recharge the card online (until recently you had to go to a terminal to do it, now there is a NFC phone app), you can't declare a card stolen, etc.
- Delk 2y ago
  Ok, that makes sense then. I know that systems with non-disposable cards exist, and we also have one in the Helsinki metro area. I think our present system assumes continuous connectivity, though. Now and then you see buses with the terminal in a non-functioning state. Ends up being a free ride. (You can also buy unlimited travel within a given zone for x days at a time, which is what those who use public transit daily usually get.) I think most people nowadays use a phone app rather than the card, though. But we also don't have gates at stations, and it's more of a trust and ticket inspections system similarly to what someone said about Norway. Japan has the Pasmo system which is weird in that it's actually more like a prepaid debit-style card that you can use not only on most public transit but also as a payment method at some shops etc. You can charge it using teller machines at stations. I can't remember the details, though.

woodruffw 2y ago

Why would a QR code require Internet, or an app? You could just print it on paper and track the corresponding balance on the server side. To my understanding this is what most transit networks do anyways, to prevent an enterprising user from modifying their balance on the card itself. (The optical scanning argument makes sense, however.)

lucianbr 2y ago
Internet is how you get from the client side to the server side. Maybe not internet but some-kind-of-net, and that has latency, failures etc. Maybe that's not clear: the turnstile needs to connect to a server to check the QR. Need to only have one server, so some turnstiles will be relatively far from it. Latency.
- woodruffw 2y ago
  > Maybe that's not clear: the turnstile needs to connect to a server to check the QR. Need to only have one server, so some turnstiles will be relatively far from it. Latency. Sure, but is this a serious design pressure? I've been on a lot of EU train and trolley networks that have a POS terminal on the train for direct sales, which are already doing networking both for the card transaction and to issue the ticket. (Again to be clear: I'm not saying a QR is better. But I don't think connectivity is a unique problem, since systems that use NFC without tying into payment cards are almost certainly using connectivity to make up for the lack of tamper resistance.)
grishka 2y ago
Even for single-use tickets, the turnstiles on the entire system need to somehow know that you've used your QR code the moment you did it. This requires them all to be connected to some sort of central server. There's a reason why single-use tickets either somehow store the validation mark on the ticket itself (NFC, magnetic stripe, paper that you have to stamp) or get taken away from you (tokens). > To my understanding this is what most transit networks do anyways, to prevent an enterprising user from modifying their balance on the card itself. On those on which this was attempted that I know of, this synchronization is far from instant. I was wrong in my other comment, in St Petersburg metro it only takes two hours for a dumped and restored card to be blocked, but you can apparently do this indefinitely on buses and trams because they aren't (weren't?) networked: https://web.archive.org/web/20170323213524/https://habrahabr.ru/post/324040/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170323213524/https://habrahabr...

gylterud 2y ago

I would like to point out that there is an implicit assumption here that we actually need a ticket system for public transport. The general concept is “the cost of the price”. Which is something to consider for public goods. If the prices would be zero, the cost of a ticket system would also be zero.

devmor 2y ago
It's kind of silly how contentious this subject is. The majority opinion is that we all pay for public works projects even if they don't benefit us, but for some reason, transit must be self-funded. It's odd, to say the least.
- kergonath 2y ago
  It makes sense if enough people with influence over lawmaking and government have a vested interest in benefiting from “free” infrastructure and some level of friction to use public transit. Add a pinch of “public transit is useless anyway, I have a chauffeur” and here you are. It is completely counter-productive and damaging to the economy and the environment, but it is not that odd, unfortunately.
steelbrain 2y ago
FWIW, even in places like Estonia, which has a free public transport (bus only?) system, the tickets are still sold/used/checked. Reportedly to get usage numbers and to cost-optimize the routes. Each resident/citizen can buy a public transport card, then tie it to their Gov ID and then tap it everywhere. You could argue that this could be replaced by some vision tech but I guess this is simpler and has dual use (visitors can purchase the card and pay instead of using for free).

cavisne 2y ago

I ran into this in France, where the ticket station used QR codes & NFC. The QR code readers are scratched up meaning printed copies without backlight didn’t work. And iPhone opens Apple wallet when you bring it near a NFC reader, hiding the QR code on your screen.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]