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Comment by k8svet | Hacker News Reader

Oooh, now do Orca cards next. Seattle is one of the tech capitals of the United States, and on top of the metro system just being not great, it's also technically inferior to nearly every single other major city that I've used public transit. Pick any European city, CDMX, Denver. They're all light years ahead of Seattle. Denver might have been my favorite.

Fun fact, one of the orgs that runs Orca actually wrote a blog post mentioning they were adding NFC support to their Android app (with some absurdly long timeline). That post is no longer to be found, and of course, years later, that functionality is absent.

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Google Wallet will soon support this (from a few days ago): https://blog.google/products/google-pay/commute-around-the-w...

edit: linking to Google's blog directly

My local transit system just added tap-to-pay that works with any credit card (or Apple/Google Pay etc.). As long as you use the same card it handles transfers, multi-day passes, etc. seamlessly as well—it will automatically ensure you're getting the correct rate (e.g. no charge for passes or rides after a certain number within a certain period).

This is how it works in London and I think New York as well now. Big upgrade over loading money on a card.

Clipper-accepting agencies in the SF Bay Area will have this next summer too.

Woah. Where can I read more?

Yep this was how it was in New York City. I was there a few months ago and remember the subway being free or reduced after 10 trips per week - tracked by the credit card number used.

This system really sucks because you can't just slide your wallet over the reader. It'll pick up your cc before your transit pass.

The move to do tap based transit with cc s is pretty stupid as that cc s get replace far more frequently than transit cards. The only person this really benefits is new users to the system that haven't figured out how to get a transit card yet.

This sort of system is really nice for visitors, tourists etc., though.

For a city you don't visit often--especially if you're going to a bunch of cities on the trip--dealing with transit apps/cards/etc. that are specific to the city is a royal pain. I'm fine if it's a city I visit regularly--I have an Oyster card for London that I've had for a number of years. In general, though, I'd rather default to using a credit card.

You can safely return that oyster card and get your deposit back now :D

I live in London and recently passed a convenience store whose signage advertised the usual stuff: "Fresh veg. Off licence. European specialty foods. Oyster". I was genuinely confused for a second that such a place would carry such short shelf life seafood...

Pre-pay card are gone here. The only people I know now who have an Oyster branded card are those who get discount or free travel.

I guess I’ll use it up and get my deposit next time I’m there. Actually looks like I can just get a refund.

Occurs to me Oyster may still make sense for travelers whose credit cards have foreign transaction fees.

In Japan at least, IC cards seem to be accepted at most cities in the country. Eg you can get a suica card (on your phone) and use it in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Not to mention at 7-11 and most vending machines.

I’ve used them but have mostly been in Tokyo for a while. US is very fragmented though as is Europe, especially as a whole.

Do note that if you want to use Suica/PASMO (or any other FeliCa based card) on an Android Phone, the phone must have been destined for Japan in the first place. The hardware is generally disabled for any non-JP SKU due to licensing fees.

The keywords one should be looking for is Osaifu-Ketai.

iPhones are the exception, and just takes some finnicking with the settings.

You used to have to use a Japanese iPhone to use a suica card in your Apple wallet, but that restriction was eliminated a few months before my trip. You should check latest restrictions and non restrictions, because it seems to change over time.

Transit card is simply another thing to haul out, manage etc. What advantage does it have over a cc?

Also with it baked into your card you don’t have to pull anything out since your phone is almost always at hand.

> as that cc s get replace far more frequently than transit cards. The only person this really benefits is new users to the system that haven't figured out how to get a transit card yet.

I respectfully disagree. I’ve lost more transit cards than credit cards. And since the tap-to-pay on credit card also works with Apple Pay and Apple has the ability to choose which card to apply transit charges to, it gets the same one every time. I have found the new system to be preferred. Plus, if every system implemented this, it makes it easier to travel and not worry about loading up a transit card that then loses its value (I have a few in my drawers from cities I’ve visited once).

How have you lost so many transit cards? I current have 4 iterations of transit cards for the CTA. I also still have many transit cards from my visits in different countries.

> so many transit cards

Well,

1. I said I lost more transit cards than credit cards. I’ve “lost” exactly one credit card so far. And I didn’t even lose it, I left it at a restaurant and when I realized it, it was a few hours later so I just got it replaced.

2. A transit card is something you use while in motion and frequently while in a hurry. When using it multiple times per day while commuting, there is significantly more opportunities than when I use my credit card. Compared to a credit card where the transaction is slower and usually not rushed.

3. Transit cards for many cities (e.g. NYC when I lived there) are designed to be mostly disposable, so they are flimsy. Compared to a thick, rigid credit card.

I also still have dozens of transit cards from different places I’ve visited. But for my home city, I lost it a few times.

Oh, no I'm not referring to the temporary limited used cards. I'm talking about full on plastic card backed by an account.

Oyster card, ventra card, charlie card, SUBE, etc.

> The only person this really benefits is new users to the system that haven't figured out how to get a transit card yet.

In many transit systems, that's millions of people per year: Tourists, occasional riders that would just forget the pass at home if they're not using it regularly etc.

> This system really sucks because you can't just slide your wallet over the reader. It'll pick up your cc before your transit pass.

There's theoretically ways to preferentially pick a given type of card, but it's quite hard and unreliable to implement, so I guess that rather than promising something they can't reliably deliver (and slowing things down in the process), transit systems just pick the first card.

It is slightly inconvenient for transit-pass-only users, but I do also see the huge benefits for the transit system and its users in aggregate.

The digitization we've seen over the past couple of decades has mostly greatly improved the experience for regular users over tokens etc. It's also mostly between a pain and terrible for the occasional user like tourists. The systems are all different with often confusing menus of options, they may not even read the default language well, etc. Tapping a CC and javing the right thing happen is so much better.

It also more deeply tracks each individuals movement through the system to a higher level of fidelity than a disposable metro card that was paid with cash.

Cash in some form is usually still an option—possibly at the cost of a lot of convenience.

Transit authorities are really being hammered with lower ridership right now. Now's the time to get rid of all the friction that prevents usage, like requiring bespoke payment solutions that need prior preparation.

Well if they looked into why they're at low ridership.. they'd probably see that they're doing a poor job. (In the states)

I can't speak towards other systems but the CTA in chicago is having issues with:

1. Actually keeping a schedule [we've been lied to about wtih them adhering to their frequency schedule they advertisesd]

2. Safety in the trains [people are using the trains to smoke, drink, deface, start fights, and live there]

3. Being reliable. There are times where they just won't run for 20-40 minutes. That makes it hard to want to use it. But they're claiming "oh we don't have enough bus/train drivers" .. yet they haven't been doing anything about it and let people go during the lockdowns.

The ease of payment isn't really a big deal with people who live and depend on these the most. (They're the 80%+ of the ridership)

Or we should be funding transit 100% from taxes because it's infrastructure that everyone benefits from (even drivers, because more transit, less other cars on the road).

You know what would prevent all friction? Making it free and properly funding it from public funding. It's literally one of those things where it doesn't matter who uses it because everyone benefits (if a rich guy gets on it for free, that's still good even though they "could have afforded it").

Well yeah. That's the ultimate friction.

Why does it matter if your credit card gets picked up before your transit card? If there's a discount or pass on the transit card, seems like the agency should let you attach it to your credit cards instead of requiring you to get a separate card.

Buying a month pass is a tax benefited account for commuting. [At many work places]. On top of that you have different pricing and you aren't paying full price at tap.

The CC being picked up means you're paying the full fare immediently even if you have the pass on the other card.

The point of the system is that you don't need the transit card anymore, because you're automatically getting the best daily rate by just using the same credit card each time. If you use a monthly or yearly pass presumably you would have to buy that separately in the first place.

> The only person this really benefits is new users to the system that haven't figured out how to get a transit card yet.

Nah. The end game here (as seen in NYC and London) is just getting rid of the transit card entirely. Which is a very positive thing, it’s an unnecessary extra layer of administration to keep track of the balance, top them up, etc etc.

Certainly as a New Yorker I’m very glad to be rid of my Metrocard. (though the new system costs $4 extra per month for unlimited travel which is BS and should be fixed)

> Which is a very positive thing, it’s an unnecessary extra layer of administration to keep track of the balance, top them up, etc etc.

While true, the negative side of this is that you lose your anonymity.

It allows you be tracked via your card, and if you look at this with an dystopian viewpoint could enable you to become targeted by specific advertising based on your purchases while riding the escalators for example.

Rather than a transit card which isn't associated to any name. At least not on the London Underground

To be clear, NYC has an OMNY card still, much like the Oyster card in London. It’s just not expected to be the default.

Curious, who are you worried about anonymity from?

If you buy a transit card with a credit card already (how most people do), there goes your anonymity from the transit system.

You can reduce tracking by credit card companies (with is the group I think would be doing a lot of analysis of spending, including when and where you travel (they get when, since it posts immediately, but they might not get where, if the transit billing all originates the same). That reduction in tracking is probably valuable.

I would think facial recognition cameras in transit systems will become commonplace, if they aren’t already. New York is already using other “AI” for fare evasion (saying they don’t currently use facial recognition). Then anonymity is completely out the door.

> It allows you be tracked via your card, and if you look at this with an dystopian viewpoint could enable you to become targeted by specific advertising based on your purchases while riding the escalators for example

Transport for London already do much deeper tracking than that based on WiFi. They know how many people use the stairs vs the escalator, which areas of the station become congested fastest during peak. It's helped them redesign stations for the better. I'm fine with that, I can opt out by turning WiFi off.

TFL is run by the Mayor, so if dystopian microlocation-based advertising was even proposed I would expect it to end very badly for him in a political sense.

My only gripe with this mode (with Opal in Sydney) is that you don’t get the trip fare displayed on the gate when you pay with a payment card. I imagine this is a technical limitation (Opal stores trip detais on-card, which it can’t do with a payment card), and is a low priority anyway (as you don’t need to know when to top up a payment card) but would be nice to have.

My city's transit system has this. It's convenient for if you're traveling alone, but traveling with kids now requires more logistics and planning than it used to. Their former electronic pass system was just an app that allowed you to activate any number of adult and child fares all on the same device. Now I have to carry separate physical cards for the kids.

I wonder how much it costs to maintain a system to collect fares compared the small portion of funding most transit systems would lose from going fare free.

Going fare free would induce demand which would increase operating costs, so it's not that simple.

The other thing about going fare-free-- which people don't like to discuss but it is a real effect which has been measured-- is that it causes much more anti-social behavior on the bus, which decreases ridership among people who have only a slight preference for transit versus just driving their car. This not only makes traffic worse (which kinda defeats the whole purpose), it also tanks political support for transit, since fewer voters are using it and then they see no point in supporting it.

Can you point to where you found this measurement? This is the first I've heard of it.

I first heard of it from the transit union here in Seattle when they axed the downtown free bus zone like 10 years ago. There was some vague mention of the bus drivers in ... somewhere in Texas... like 30 years before that.

Beyond that I haven't heard much of it because as I understand it, there isn't much free transit anywhere big.

May I introduce you to the country of Luxembourg that offers free public transport - admittedly one of the smallest nations in Europe in area (2,586.4 km2 (998.6 sq mi)) and population (660,809), but bigger than many cities.

Also one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with a GDP per capita over 1.5x the United States.

Ok sure, the metro area here served by the bus is like 2.5 million or something.

Luxembourg does not have many homeless, one of the things making free a challenge in other places.

Seattle got rid of its downtown core free ride area in part because of disruptive and illegal behavior by riders.

Analemma_'s comment made it sound like some broad and well-studied thing. All I've seen is mention of a single city. This is not remotely enough to support the claim.

My claim was based on skimming an article that said fares ranged from about 10 to 50% of funding and I speculated that most probably tended toward 10% since most are small, and small ones depend on federal funding, special purpose taxes (Georgia has a lot of SPLOST[0] projects), and partnerships.

Smaller systems suffer from low ridership and might see more benefit from dropping fares. A full bus and an empty bus cost about as much to run, but a system of full buses is easier to bolster and improve because more people will support it.

And I don't see why this would be connected to behavior on buses and trains. Where is this research? At least for Seattle since everyone wants to focus on it for some reason. News articles for a single city are not research.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_local-option_s...

I'm just stating that was the reason given by Metro and was the public perception at the time. I was among the public affected by it, and my anecdotal experience is that problems on the routes starting in Seattle and ending in the suburbs were fewer after the free fare zone was eliminated. It certainly doesn't consitute reasarch.

I seemed to remember reading something similar about Austin's buses when they went fare-free in the 80s. I found this linked in the Austin CapMetro wiki page: http://www.nctr.usf.edu/pdf/473-132.pdf

This reminds me of MetaFilter, where a one-time $5 payment is required to post. Just this small speedbump seems to do a pretty good job of keeping opportunistic trolls and vandals off the site. "Free" is too often an invitation to abuse.

Citation needed for that causes anti social behavior claim!

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/warning-seattles-f...

They've since refused to ticket people who get on without paying. You can also see plenty of ASB.

Which sounds to me like a good reason to publicly fund it in the first place

Depending on the agency it’s not very small.

New York MTA has a farebox recovery of about 40-50% in any given year, and few people or organizations could stomach a pay cut of half without serious damage.

It seems like a city with a ~$2 trillion economy could afford to fund the transit system that enables it without fare boxes.

It would represent 10% of the budget of the entire state. New York City has the highest taxes in the country already, and a ten percent hike would almost certainly have to hurt regular citizens as well.

Whoa. Does that mean the other half of the money comes from people who don't use the MTA?

It comes from general taxes. But thats the same with nearly all transportation infrastructure, people without cars are paying general funds taxes for roads, since gas taxes do not cover all road funding.

It’s worth noting that the MTA is necessary for car drivers as well. Whenever it gets knocked out due to a hurricane and travelers switch to driving, there is gridlock across the entire region and travel comes to a screeching halt.

Related: isn't there a way to "clone" an NFC card using (rooted) Android?

I have been looking into how feasible it could be doing so on iOS since my office door opens via an NFC card, but iirc Apple has a tighter grip on the NFC hardware than with general PassKit, meaning that a regular app can't do that.

Kinda. NFC is a broad spectrum of protocols. For example the old blue Orca cards are MiFare DESFire cards which actually store the card’s value in the card’s internal chip- this type (while having some flaws) cannot easily be copied onto a phone.

A simple NFC tag with binary data is trivial to copy though.

Only very old systems, or those where the cost of the tag has to be as low as possible (e.g. for single-ride throwaway paper tickets), use unauthenticated bearer tokens.

Access control systems these days usually do not, for obvious reasons.

A perfect use case for a Flipper

[1] https://docs.flipper.net/nfc/read

https://info.myorca.com/news/can-i-use-my-phone-to-pay-for-a...

Tap to pay coming to orca in 2023, they’ve got ~2 months left for it to be true

I’m optimistic because google recently put out a post that google wallet will support ORCA soon (as shared by another commenter)

Seattle government and area transit agencies is pretty bad at this kind of thing. If they say 2023, they probably mean 2025 or later.

This, really this. Since Washington state doesn’t have an E driver license yet (like say Utah), I carry around three cards in my iPhone (orca, DL, a backup credit card just in case NFC isn’t supported). I dream of the day when orca actually supports a phone based IC card, and a phone based DL is accepted as well.

The reason they replaced all the Orca card terminals last year (and issued a new generation of cards) was, in part, to support NFC through the wallet apps. It's been a multi-year migration.

https://info.myorca.com/news/can-i-use-my-phone-to-pay-for-a...

The post still exists, but no updates since then

Best transit card I have used has been in HK. The value on the card can be used in small shops around the city up to $150 dollars.

Yeah, it's weird how in Seattle the Orca card is still barely reaching the convenience and utility that the Octopus card had in Hong Kong over 20 years ago.

Then again, it's not being carried along by a large subway system under incredible urban density.

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