When it comes to ticket gate line in a public transport system, latency and throughput are basically the same thing. There is no practical way to increase the

When it comes to ticket gate line in a public transport system, latency and throughput are basically the same thing. There is no practical way to increase the throughput of ticket line, without reducing latency. It’s not like you can install more gates in most stations, the station isn’t big enough, and you can’t make the gates smaller because the people aren’t small enough. Every transit system measures and has throughput requirements that their gates need to meet. That inherently means latency requirements, because one gate can’t process multiple people in parallel! Also western systems aren’t that slow. The videos in the article are a decade out of date and show people in London using paper tickets! And almost nobody using a contactless card or Oyster card. In London the Oyster cards are very fast. Fast enough that a brisk walking pace the gates will be completely open by the time you reach them, assuming you put your card on the reader the moment it’s within comfortable reach. Contactless payments on the other hand are slower. But there’s not much TfL can do there. The slower speed is entirely the result of the contactless cards taking longer to process the transaction. TfL track contactless cards latencies by bank and card manufacture. There’s a non-trivial difference in latency between different card manufactures and bank configurations. But that’s not something TfL can control themselves.