London's Oyster card: Are its days numbered?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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…)
We don’t want to lose this privacy because as mentioned. We’ll never get it back.
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.
IIRC you can’t have a WeChat pay account without a Chinese bank account.
I would much prefer if this was true for most public transit networks in the world, including the rest of the UK.
I'd also argue that in this case the fault is on the cardholder for being with a shit bank when better options exist in the vast majority of countries.
In fact I deliberately own a non-contactless credit card (from my good bank, who were happy to send me the non-contactless version when requested even though their default is contactless) and then enrolled that card in my phone so the phone can make contactless purchases.
Thus, my credit card can't be hijacked to do remote purchases because purchases with the card require a physical connection, and yet I can make fairly large card purchases contactlessly, because my phone vouches for them after I unlock it.
[1] https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/when-apple-pay-requi...
EMV lets the card (or in this case maybe a phone) and the terminal (in this case a turnstile inside the station, or a reader on a bus) negotiate what to do, the issuer may not be involved since it's possible they'll agree the entire transaction needn't yet involve the issuer. This is related to one bug in EMV, you could intercede in the middle to tell the card "It's OK, no need for a PIN" and also tell the terminal, "Yes, the PIN supplied was correct" and since the terminal doesn't know the correct PIN you've now got a shim that allows you to use the wrong PIN with a stolen card†.
Anyway, TfL terminals aren't going to agree to signatures. So, if your card really does only work with a signature then you can't use the turnstiles, along with presumably many other modern conveniences.
† There are obvious technical fixes. But the fixes cost money, and fraud is a cost banks can pass to their customers, guess what happens next.
Even if my card worked the first time I wouldn't trust it would work the 3rd or 4th. Until I bought a monthly pass every trip took time and some luck. I wish I knew prepaid cards were an option.
They're human, too. Often dumb, most often uninterested and lazy. And everyone gives up at some point.
It wasn't that long ago Google or Apple were Saint. The future is Apple Pay, Cashless, Contactless Credit Card, Crypto.
It wasn't that long ago people that worries about privacy or freedom were over reacting, paranoid, pessimistic.
It wasn't that long ago having physical Cash, topping up your Oyster / Opal / Myki / Suica / Octopus / EZ-Link / Presto or any other Top Up Prepaid Card were dumb. The future is Apple Wallet.
How the tides have turned
In fact most of the decisions around ticketing were more about reducing costs and improving efficiency than reducing privacy (that was just the side effect) for example on buses people paying with cash were massively slowing down the boarding in busy areas, so they made pre-pay or opal only buses during peak hours hours in some areas to improve the on time running. Bus drivers also hated dealing with change and carrying money as well. They were already trying to phase out the use of cash on buses and I think covid accelerated that trend as they now had a great excuse to do so everywhere.
In fact even a few years ago there was already discussion of using CCTV and facial recognition to track people through stations and what they use, the idea being you could then pay for your trip the same way those Amazon supermarkets work as that would reduce the congestion at gates and allow better tracking of full trips as Opal data can't determine your exact route, only the parts where you tapped.
The reality is most people will complain far more about having to pay slightly higher ticket costs than for the loss of privacy, so it's a fairly easy decision for politicians to make and why Australia has so many sweeping surveillance powers.
>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.
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).
As long as the hardware FeliCa secure element is there, all you have to do is install the relevant apps from the Play Store (the apps themselves might be region locked; I do have my Play Store account set to Japan)
> Pixel 3 and later smartphones purchased in Japan have a FeliCa chip in the same place as the NFC chip.
So it's special
So it isn't; all phones have the hardware. However, it seems something blocks the FeliCa apps from running on non-Japanese phones. It could be just a region flag.
(Don't trust customer support sites for technical information; the people writing those don't know how the real hardware works)
However, a public transport system has to be for everyone. There are legal and political consequences to making it difficult or impossible for certain demographics to use public transport. There's also the fact that the most marginalised in our society are often incredibly reliant on public transport. That's why TfL and other public bodies have to undertake an Equality Impact Assessment for any policy change and take these things very seriously.
https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/buses/cashless/
You're right that contactless cards usually require a fixed address, although some banks allow you to use any address you can receive post at (e.g. a friend's address).
Businesses look for efficiencies and that often means limiting their services to specific groups or requiring many prerequisites (either stated or implied). Government doesn't have that luxury and therefore has to be some level of inefficient. That doesn't stop government from offering modern internet-based services, it just means they have to keep the fallback process as well. For example, I can do my annual license plate renewal online with a credit card from the comfort of my home. If I don't have a credit card I can also go down to the ministry of transport office and pay in cash. A business could easily decide having physical offices all over the province is grossly expensive and make a switch to online payments only. Government doesn't (and shouldn't) have that option.
I absolutely agree. Except these private company were publicly advocating to abolish physical cash and top up card. Pushing their narrative towards a future which everything goes through Smartphone where the company have a strategic interest in doing so. While proclaiming themselves as the guardian of privacy and protector of their users.
This isn't the first time the subject of dropping Oyster card or any Top Up card payment in any part of the world has come up. Last time ( if I remember correctly it was 2016, roughly during the launch of Android Pay on Tfl or something like that, thinking about it now it might have been a PR piece ) there were people in the general public who really believe the future is cashless and all in Smartphone. And the general narrative at the time was dropping Oyster card some time in the future was inevitable because Tfl and other Transport companies around the world doesn't want the burden of running their own payment system in other to save cost. And if I remember correctly the answer Tfl gave at the time wasn't as clear cut as it is now.
So I am extremely happy to read a firm stand from Tfl on this issue.
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.
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.
Oyster's PAYG pricing only covers daily travel (either the whole day or the off peak). For a week or longer yes you should buy (on Oyster) a fixed duration travelcard in advance. But let's continue the thought experiment.
If you travel in zones 2-3 for work you would want a Travelcard for those journeys, indeed, and you'd likely buy that for an Oyster (I believe paper tickets for this still exist, but they might not) which is £27.70 per week, or maybe you do this constantly that's £1108 for the whole year.
However that work travelcard covers zone 1 anyway, so the tourist trips into zone 1 are free for you.
Suppose the tourist trips are instead outward, and you're entering zone 4. Now these trips aren't free, but the day travelcard that includes zone 4 is £13.90 and the Oyster cap to zone 4 is £10.60 so you won't save money by buying another travelcard for the tourist trips, using PAYG with the cap is significantly cheaper and easier.
One thing a careful Londoner might do if the tourist friend is visiting for a bit longer and they (for some reason) don't carry a very long period travelcard or it was due to expire anyway, is choose to "upgrade" to more zones for say one week and then buy their usual card again. Suppose your card runs out on Friday, your friend lands Saturday morning and you're taking a week off exploring Greater London with them. You could buy a zone 1-9 weekly card from Saturday to Friday, just under £100 for all trips almost anywhere in the network for that week.
However, the tourist gets almost as good a deal on their foreign credit card because it has a weekly cap, the TFL credit card system thinks only in Monday-Sunday weeks, so their maximum cost is £135.10 for the same trips (two days, plus one week) but if they sometimes don't hit the daily caps it'll be far lower, so even just two "quiet" days with fewer journeys or staying in central London would demolish the price difference.
Oh, you're right, that's what I was missing; I could've sworn you could get 2&3-only travelcards.
This happens live because you are shown the current balance (which needs this calculation) when completing journeys in some places, and can also check it from outside the system.
So you can see that a journey you just made cost say 10p even though obviously there are no fares that low, because 10p was the difference between the cheapest way to do your previous set of journeys, and the cheapest way to do all those journeys plus the new one.
† There are sometimes weird corner cases where e.g. travelling one extra stop and walking back is slightly cheaper but that's a different journey not an extra one.
why? oyster is a stored value card
the barrier where you tap-out calculates and takes the money off the card instantly, and given the interaction time to get you through the barrier the computation is necessarily limited
whereas a contactless card is effectively being a pointer to a bank account that can be charged at a later date
for TfL there is a batch process at the end of the day which does that
Which can lead to some perplexing notifications from your bank at 0400 when it says you've just charged £N at A.N.Tube and it takes you a good three minutes before you realise it's not someone cloning your card but the journey you made 18 hours ago.
I guess because they couldn’t work out a way for you to purchase a travel card on your contactless card, so this was the only way to allow regular commuters to use their contactless.
Anyway it was the reason I switched over from oyster to contactless. I realised I was getting ripped off as I would always use PAYG and _sometimes_ went over the caps.
I don't know what alpha-beta pruning is, and I'm not necessarily asserting it's massively complex, and I don't know anything about/haven't worked in the area beyond as a user - just pointing out it's not as simple as it might at first seem.
Basically, you do a breadth-first full recursive solve, but bail out of any branch that is clearly worse than other candidates.
If I'm poking through something I maybe want but might get in person, and I find something I've already bought that fits my need again... I'm more likely to buy again than to wander over to a physical store. Especially true for things I don't buy often and then need suddenly, like casual clothing (oops, ripped it) or random felt pads for furniture (oh dear, that's going to scratch things up quick).
I'm also less likely to hem and haw about it until I just buy from a physical store. (For example, "these paper towels or those? idk, decide tomorrow" and then buy with groceries the next day.)
Besides, if you rebuy, then return, that's worse for them than if you just never rebought. Sure, they'll probably charge you a restock fee, but I'm not entirely convinced it covers the full cost to Amazon.
That makes me way more likely to just buy from Amazon, even if another merchant is slightly cheaper.
It has a weird effect where I would take a couple of extra journeys just to whack it into the next tier. Like head into Leeds on the bus to browse the shops and get lunch.
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
When I was living in the UK I only had an oystercard to lend it to friends and family visiting. Used Apple pay or my creditcard for all of my own travel.
I'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.)
[1] https://tweakers.net/nieuws/77247/uitrol-veiligere-ov-chipka...
It is shocking how much better the much older MTR system is in Hong Kong in comparison.
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.
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.
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...
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).
I stand corrected!
The cards also work on other things, like the many vending machines in Japan, I wonder if they're all online. Maybe the protocol is designed that subtractions are easy but additions are hard...
The balance is stored on the card, in fact the balance being stored on the card is something that people complain about constantly because there is a 24 hour period where the buses need to return to the depot to update and people hate that.
I'd love to read it again if anyone has this information
When the validator detects a staff Oyster card, it does check if the card is hotlisted (in case it was lost/stolen). But otherwise there's very little logic required.
Those challenges aren't necessarily insurmountable, but I imagine it would be a lot more complicated to do than it might first appear.
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.
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).
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.
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
[0] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/refunds-and-replacements/oyster-pay...
For older Oyster cards that have a deposit, you can still reclaim that £5.
The fee/deposit payment is part of it (prevention, it not seeming a disposable item) but with a deposit (there's no good way to say this..) there's also the incentive for the homeless or otherwise desperate to clear them up, since there's some guaranteed value. (Which could be a bit less than £5 due to negative get-me-home-at-night balance, but I don't think it's allowed to go as far as -£5, so a card with a deposit on it is always an asset.)
Oh I remember. Now it's £1.55 and rising. Public transport in the UK is now becoming luxury
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.
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.
If I remember correctly, one of the reasons public transportation outside london is so poor in comparison is that councils outside London are not allowed to subsidise it the same way London is. They are also forced to use private operators.
You can do this with the tube, although it's less often necessary, e.g. suppose you're at Barbican and you live in Amersham. It might happen that your tube from Barbican turns into a Fast to Amersham and that's actually a reasonable way to get home. But much more likely you should disembark at Baker Street, leave the station, walk a few minutes to Marylebone, tap back in and board a mainline train to Amersham, since that's actually the same exact system and counts as a single Oyster journey between Barbican and Amersham.
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.
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!
When I take a train in Czechia with a digital ticket, the conductor always scans the QR code.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.